tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-280516722019-01-20T13:58:35.127+00:00Thompson's Bank of Communicable DesireTheatre, art, poetry, music, London, the weather, airports, sudden fury, different music, still not cutting down on sugary snacks, film, horses, people doing sin, incidents, refractions, the entire dark dream outside.Chris Goodehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17993698000314709291noreply@blogger.comBlogger311125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28051672.post-27140818488289165462014-03-24T00:53:00.000+00:002014-03-24T00:59:12.729+00:00In my room<div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/1fQT-GjKlLw?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0' /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Beach Boys, 'In My Room' (live, March 14th 1964)</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: left;">Rooms to change from public to private and back. Rooms where the figure becomes the body. Rooms that magnify the body and shrink the world. Rooms for both hiding and seeking. Rooms that take you away from it all.<br /><div style="text-align: right;">-- from Barbara Kruger, 'Again, Again, Again and Again' (2003)</div></blockquote><br />"I like the room," said Hugh, our production manager, on day one of rehearsals for <i><a href="http://www.theatreroyal.com/whats-on/2014/mad-man/" target="_blank">MAD MAN</a></i>. "It's got a good beat." It's one of the nicest things anyone's ever said about my work, and of course it's hardly about my work at all.<br /><br />For a while now I've been really fascinated by the ways in which we imagine theatre -- not the content or detail of any particular instance of theatre, but more generally theatre as a practice or a social act -- and the metaphors by which those imaginings get passed around, become realised as material, as architecture and infrastructure and organization. My forthcoming book <i>The Forest and the Field</i>, which is substantially about exactly this question -- how what we think theatre can do is shaped by how we imagine it spatially and what metaphors we bring to bear on its cultural position -- started, for example, in noticing how the idea of the Globe theatre as a 'wooden O', as invoked in <i>Henry V</i>, attaches to the word (or non-word) "O!" as a sign of wonder and subjunctivity, and how that might provide a frame for thinking about approximately O-shaped territories in Shakespeare, such as the island of <i>The Tempest</i>, which functions so vividly as a theatrical space, a zone energised reflexively by the liminal permissiveness of theatre.<br /><br />One of the most interesting day-to-day instances in theatre of material and metaphor in a productive dialogue is the idea of 'the room', which is an intriguing and often fruitfully ambiguous amalgam of the authored and the emergent. What Hugh was referring to was obviously not, or not only, the actual room we were in; he was talking about what it felt like to be in that room. Another time, talking about a different room -- this time, the Drum theatre itself -- he mentioned that he liked its "temperature": and again, he wasn't talking about its actual temperature, although if its actual temperature did change -- if that space were as extremely cold as many rehearsal rooms can be, or as extremely hot as a prefab performance space on the Edinburgh fringe after the lights have been on all day -- then the semi-metaphorical temperature would change accordingly.<br /><br />It's an interesting feedback loop. The rehearsal room that Hugh said had a "good beat", Rehearsal Studio 3 at TR2, Theatre Royal Plymouth's still-astonishing production facility, is probably the nicest room-for-making-in that I've ever had the pleasure to spend a month in. What's nice about it? For one thing, it's big: big enough to contain not only a Drum show marked out at actual size, but also additional workstations in relation to and support of that performance area. It's very tall, and very light: there is a strip of windows running round the entire room, but also enough black tabs so that all the natural light can be shut out when that's helpful. But its dimensions and affordances don't overwhelm: some rooms won't adapt temperamentally to the ambience you try to create, but that one does. So you are not, as you are in some other big making-rooms, at its mercy. It is, in the best (if weirdest) sense, a good collaborator. There is air in the room. There is compliance.<br /><br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-3kHG-l1awvE/Uy9rFYuKNFI/AAAAAAAAD6E/z5Oyewo8mlk/s1600/ST2_0778.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-3kHG-l1awvE/Uy9rFYuKNFI/AAAAAAAAD6E/z5Oyewo8mlk/s1600/ST2_0778.jpg" height="246" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br />A nail-biting experience: rehearsing <i>MAD MAN&nbsp;</i>in Rehearsal Room 3 at TR2<br />L to R: Leonie Macdonald (DSM), self, Jennifer Tang (assistant director)<br />Photo: Steve Tanner</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><br />I am aware that here I am already beginning to describe some ideas that sit somewhere between personal taste and ethical commitment. Ventilation, for example, is a quality in a room that helps to create an experience of comfort, and, by extension, of calm. I like my working environment to be very calm. Years ago when I worked with a branding agency for a while they had a notice on the wall, a sort of upwardly-mobile version of "You don't have to be mad to work here but it helps"; this slogan said something like: "A creative environment is not a calm environment." I think it was put there mostly to excuse the incredibly bad behaviour of the boss, who I suspect liked to think of her screaming volatility as an aspect of maverick flair she utterly did not in fact possess, rather than as the tasteless and tyrannical exhibition of bad manners it actually was. I think I can only think straight -- or, even more importantly, I think I can only think deviantly -- in an atmosphere of calm, even (or especially) if the work itself is -- as <i>MAD MAN </i>is -- manifestly nuts. Two people separately have told me over the past few weeks that my calm in the room is "Zen-like": which in a way is odd, as I certainly don't feel anywhere near that calm in the rest of my life, and in truth I seldom actually feel it in the room: but even if I don't feel it, I feel my way towards it by trying -- I don't always succeed -- to perform it for the sake of everyone else. As Iyanla Vanzant instructs her mentees as a mode of last resort: "Fake it till you make it, baby."<br /><br />The academic Simon Shepherd interviewed me a couple of years ago for his (excellent) book on directing, and the stuff that made it into print was mostly about exactly this point: that in a practice that's about collective making -- even where there's a script from the get-go, or a clearly defined target on which the activity is focused -- the director's job, it now seems to me, is not so much about authoring the work as about authoring the negotiable aspects of the room in which the work happens: which is in turn about a seemingly retrograde self-perception of the director as somehow exemplary. My job, in other words, is to set the tone: to create the right conditions for the making of the work in part by trying to demonstrate their enaction.<br /><br />Most saliently, I guess, this shows up in my commitment to asking everyone in the room to check in and check out at the beginning and end of every day. It's a routine I'd never come across until I worked with Karl James and Andy Smith on Tim Crouch's <i>The Author</i>, and I don't know how it came to be part of <i>that </i>room, but -- perhaps because I experienced it as an actor first, rather than as a director -- I found it profoundly transformative, and I started integrating it into my own directorial practice straight away. It's (on the surface) dead simple: everyone sits together at the start of the day and each individual is asked, and then asks someone else: "How are you?" It's a smalltalk question given its proper bigtalk weight: you're encouraged to answer fully and carefully and to check in reflectively with yourself: no but how are you <i>really</i>? Sometimes, even with that much care taken, there's not a lot to say -- I'm fine, I'm good, I'm OK; I slept badly, my cold's getting worse, I'm slightly stressed out because of my bad journey in, I'm a bit homesick today... But the twenty-nine times there's nothing in particular to say are so incredibly worth working through, honestly and with integrity, because of the thirtieth time, when there's something difficult to say, something it's worth naming so you can put it down or move it around: I really don't want to be here today, I'm doubting myself or the work, I need something different out of today, I feel incredibly sad or angry or upset and I don't know why.<br /><br />Checking-in at the top of the morning -- and checking out again at the end of the day -- is a brilliant protocol partly for practical reasons: it gives everyone a space in which to really see and hear everyone else, in a way that's hard to be sure of unless it's systematically managed, and it tickles out all kinds of information that individuals might otherwise find it impossibly hard to voice, if only because no suitable space exists for speaking it into; but it's also a very clear signal about the room, about how in doing what we do we want to be more fully visible to each other so that we can become as good as we can be at taking care of each other, at really being with each other inside as well as outside the work. As a director I get a huge amount of information from that quarter-hour at the start and end of the day, even if it's just in noticing how exactly people are saying "I haven't really got anything to say", what their body language is as they say it, where in their body their voice is coming out of, that sort of thing; good also to watch people listening to each other, to the extent that they can -- noticing who's able to keep track of the conversation and who isn't because either side of their own 'turn' in the check-in circle their attention has turned back in on themselves.<br /><br />So that's just one way in which, and through which, I'm thinking about what I want 'the room' to be, and those wants are partly about the room itself (e.g. I want us to be warm enough but not sleepy-warm; but I'd also quite like there to be a couch so that anyone who really is sleepy can get a nap in sometime), and partly about who we are to each other <i>in </i>the room (e.g. I want us to be able to see each other's faces in detail so the lighting has to support that; I want us to be able to have a laugh in here which means not inadvertently setting up signals of piety -- protocols of 'sacred space' and the like). And then there's a question about how 'the room' sits in relation to other rooms, what it allows in from the outside world. So, Katie Mitchell (according to her book anyway) doesn't want people to have their coats and bags with them -- these accoutrements have a separate room, or are screened off; contrariwise, I'd much rather all that stuff was in with us, reminding us that we haven't stepped out of our lives in stepping in to this room, but rather that we are continuing to live those lives as bagged and coated people. Likewise, on day one of a project, especially a workshop, I'll make sure there's music playing, just as I would at a dinner party: not because I want anyone's attention on it, but because I want straight away to let them know that the room will hold them, so they don't have to reach strenuously across the gaps created by awkward first-day silence: we can just sit together and the room won't feel intimidatingly silent if we're all feeling a bit shy and turned-in. And anyway there's something about music playing that says: this is also a conversation, this is also a place into which music flows because we are bringing our full faculties into the room, our full capacity for thinking and feeling as people, not just as designated actors or stage management or whatever. We invite into the room as much -- of everything -- as the room can help us to hold.<br /><br /><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/QnjPzOqlQXI?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0' /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Helios, 'The Toy Garden' - a track to be found on my Workshop Day 1 playlist</span></div><br /><br /><br />But all these questions about what sort of 'room' one wants to craft, to invite people into, change in relation to the room itself. Another beloved actual-room is the basement at CPT, which could hardly be more different from Rehearsal Room 3 at TR2. It's a space in which I've made many pieces, beginning with <i>Napoleon in Exile </i>in 2002, and a room which has been through many changes, including a major refurbishment project in 2003-04. It has no natural light at all, and a low ceiling. It used to be full of junk, and then it got refurbed and became rather stark and chic, and now it's got a bit of junk in it again and is probably at its happiest. In its chic period it had funny little delicate spotlights and cool folding tables, and being there always felt like overhearing an old mate talking in an unfamiliar phone voice. Remnants of that period remain, but they're just part of its story now. The point is, there's a challenge to a space like that, but it's an interesting challenge. What can one do, as an author of 'the room', to create a sense of natural light where there is none? Or, what might the distinct affordances of such a space be that would allow for things to come through that made natural light feel like the worst idea in the world? -- This isn't an answer in relation to that specific question, but it's come to my mind: the brilliant Ned Glasier told me a while ago, with regard to his work at <a href="http://www.islingtoncommunitytheatre.com/" target="_blank">Islington Community Theatre</a>, that when new people come for the first time to work with ICT, they're always met and greeted right at the door of the room, so that they don't have to walk across the floor to join the group before they're acknowledged. It's a fantastic way of making someone feel welcome. Even an etiquette as simple and common-sense as that could be, in a sense, a useful substitute for natural light.<br /><br />(Incidentally, sometimes one can find oneself slightly out of alignment with one's own room, which is interesting. I've been very struck for example by how a combination of the nature of the physical room, the orthodoxies around working in large institutions, and the practical requirements of cueing and controlling sound, left me directing <i>MAD MAN </i>mostly seated at a desk alongside my assistant director and DSM. I would never normally direct from a desk, or even -- on the whole -- sitting down. Very early on in my directing career I learned I watched the work better, and thought more articulately about it, if I was standing up and wandering around: a trick I picked up from an old Radio 1 DJ who always used to present her lunchtime show on her feet for the same reason -- thus making me, I suspect, one of the few directors of any generation who could legitimately claim to be quite significantly influenced by Jakki Brambles.)<br /><br />However: these rather meandering reflections were prompted not, or not only, by Hugh's nice (and not unreminiscent of Jakki Brambles, come to think of it) remark -- "It's got a good beat" -- or by the great pleasure of having spent four weeks at TR2, an uncommon luxury by any standards. They were triggered also by the pain of having to say goodbye to a particular room, and maybe, moreover, to the 'room' that was made there. My longterm collaborator Jonny Liron has recently moved to a new flat and out of his old live/work space, where he spent four complicated, challenging, but (I infer) often rewarding years. Shortly after he moved in to that now-vacated studio in the spring of 2010 we named it The Situation Room, inspired of course by <i>The West Wing </i>rather than by any actual National Security fetish, but the same redolences applied: we were after a sense of urgency, of work-to-be-done, of high stakes, of whatever Snuffy Walden-soundtracked narratives would make sense of Jonny waking up every day on a mattress on the concrete floor of a spartan white-walled room in pitch darkness.<br /><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/vN8U-TSbfwE?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0' /></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Leo (John Spencer) and Fitzwallace (John Amos) in a Situation Room scene&nbsp;</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">from <i>The West Wing </i>Season 3 episode 20</span></div><br /><br />The Sit Room (as it quickly and inevitably became) was in a way the perfect HQ for the partnership that we were about to start calling Action one19 (also a <i>West Wing </i>reference, though a more obscure one). It was as much a den as a work room: a base for action -- 'action' I guess as opposed to, for example, 'rehearsal', which always seems to refer, in order to justify itself, to some future event that hasn't happened yet. To me, and I think to Jonny, at least for a while, there was no contradiction in viewing such 'action' as political, even if we as its two makers were also its only two witnesses. We too, in a way, were getting ready for something later: or maybe the better way to say that is that we were looking for stuff that we'd only recognize when we found it. We found, and recognized, a lot: at least for a while.<br /><br />There's something, of course, ideal (or 'ideal') about a live/work space. I was just remembering earlier that <i><a href="http://chrisgoodeandcompany.co.uk/shows/open-house/" target="_blank">Open House</a></i>, the Chris Goode &amp; Co project where absolutely anyone who wants to can walk through the door and join in with a devising process, started out as a putative Action one19 project called <i>Live/Work</i>, which was basically the same except the core company would just have been the two of us, and instead of the room being open between 10am and 9pm, we'd have been open all hours, and if people wanted to come and watch us sleep, or have breakfast, or take a shower, that would have been fine too. (I'm a little sorry we never did that; perhaps it'll come back in some form at some point.) In terms of the porosity of 'the room', the way it relates to the Big Room all around it, live/work is sort of a limit case. There is no 'other' room abutting in which to stow your coats and bags, or for that matter your tins of mackerel and your dogeared poetry books, your high-vis gear and your Slava Mogutin photographs. How many partitions would Katie Mitchell have wanted to install in the Sit Room?<br /><br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-o5qcY8p7Xn4/Uy93bbM-i_I/AAAAAAAAD6k/KOB-qM3qURE/s1600/acdc2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-o5qcY8p7Xn4/Uy93bbM-i_I/AAAAAAAAD6k/KOB-qM3qURE/s1600/acdc2.jpg" height="400" width="265" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br />'Punk Ass (Justus)' by <a href="http://slavamogutin.com/" target="_blank">Slava Mogutin</a>, 1999<br />as seen on the wall of the Situation Room 2010-14</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><br />From the very beginning, the Situation Room was an experiment in living, and perhaps from the very same beginning, it was an experiment in conscientious shortfall. The Sit Room demanded a way of life that was probably impossible: it was a room that made no sense until it was being used, concertedly, as a non-domestic space. The upside of that was a great exhilaration when it <i>was </i>so used, as a working and living space in which the difference between work and life was, properly, no longer discernible. I'd sometimes go over for a couple of hours and end up staying for eight, losing track of time in a way that I never do anywhere else; working with Jonny and just being together were not distinct modalities: a conversation regarding a particular artistic provocation could end up in us writing together at the computer screen (or on the walls), or listening to music, or taking photographs of each other, or making some sort of structure together, or fucking, or playing Mastermind or tossing a basketball around, or swapping YouTube videos, or Jonny just smoking and me just watching him smoke, like a fascinated dog. We could start anywhere in that system, and end anywhere, and I invariably left feeling realer than when I arrived.<br /><br />Sometimes the Sit Room opened its doors, and it felt good when it did. There were readings and performances, installations and photoshoots. Early on especially there were quite frequent public presentations: I remember Timothy Thornton launching his extraordinary chapbook <i>Jocund Day</i>&nbsp;there with an astonishingly intimate reading; I remember a beautiful semi-improvised duet between Jonny and his pal Andrew Oliveira, and Jonny's collaboration with installation artist Charlotte Law. Most of the contributors to <i>Better Than Language </i>read there at some point, many more than once. There was a short-lived improvisation workshop curated by Jonny and Jamie Wood. Quite often, visitors enjoyed drawing on the walls. As Action one19 we showed there perhaps our most developed work, <i>The Infancy Gospel of Pseudo-Belladonna</i>, a piece which ended each night with the ritual burning of all its props and printed texts, and the dancing of embers in the pitch-black room. You can't do that in Rehearsal Room 3 at TR2. You can't even do it in the basement at CPT. That was one of the wonderful things about the Sit Room, one of the things I'll miss the most: the beautifully reverberant silence where the health and safety checks and the licensing arrangements would otherwise have been. Audiences drank and smoked and sometimes stayed the night; performers scaled the walls, the music might be punishingly loud, there might be absolute darkness (something you experience much less often than you think), the night might end with a melange of blood and piss and semen and molten wax and ash and cat-shit and garbage all over the floor: but there was also, always, a sense of being among friends and fellow-travellers: there was art and there was wanking but there was very little art-wank because the Sit Room was a place of ineffable integrity and, in its way, gentleness. That was the 'room' that Jonny, and those of us who were fortunate from time to time to share the space with him, installed in the room. It was a place in which love and poetry and strong coffee and revolutionary plans and unholy mess were all made, and all made in constant churning dialogue with each other.<br /><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-isa1lYM7rkE/Uy95x4zdupI/AAAAAAAAD6w/FZC9zdUrb58/s1600/img_2322.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-isa1lYM7rkE/Uy95x4zdupI/AAAAAAAAD6w/FZC9zdUrb58/s1600/img_2322.jpg" height="266" width="400" /></a></div><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-nJqVEgUK_HY/Uy958XC3lSI/AAAAAAAAD64/3snA8AoV1Jg/s1600/raha-sitroom.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-nJqVEgUK_HY/Uy958XC3lSI/AAAAAAAAD64/3snA8AoV1Jg/s1600/raha-sitroom.jpg" height="400" width="267" /></a></div><br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-GxTqqiAhqb8/Uy9-7N-1qmI/AAAAAAAAD7I/E4gJ5NIFsA0/s1600/pseudo-b+promo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-GxTqqiAhqb8/Uy9-7N-1qmI/AAAAAAAAD7I/E4gJ5NIFsA0/s1600/pseudo-b+promo.jpg" height="266" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br />The Sit Room: top to bottom:<br /><br />Jonny Liron / Charlotte Law collaboration, August 2012, photo Blair Zaye<br /><br />Jonny drenches CG during a reading, November 2010, photo Nat Raha<br /><br />Jonny in R&amp;D for Action one19's <i>The Infancy Gospel of Pseudo-Belladonna</i>, November 2012, photo CG</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><br />Latterly we tried, perhaps misguidedly, to make the Sit Room more viable by cleaning it up and renting it out as a rehearsal space. It was weird to paint over the huge sign in the back corner that said 'CAPITALISM STOPS HERE': but I guess the act of doing so at least proved that the message was more wishful thinking than sustainable mission statement. At any rate the circle wouldn't be squared, and that chapter in our lives is over. As I write this I realise how bereaved I feel about that. I feel like I should have done more. We could all have done more to make that space as obstinate as it wanted to be. We might never have learned to love the grimy toilets down the end of the hallway, or the music that would sometimes blare out of an adjoining studio in the middle of a fragile improvisation. But I think it was the only genuinely dissident space I have ever known for long enough that it's changed me. It was where, perhaps, I really learned how the materialities of a room and the tone of the 'room' you try to create within its walls can sing joyously to each other about a single project in which the slash between LIFE and WORK really does cut through some of the cultural and economic bullshit that abstracts us from our labour and separates us from our comrades. "Why do I stop at my skin?" asks the young hero of John Berger's <i>G</i>; at the Sit Room, you never felt you did. (This is, I suppose, partly why it still bothers me, as I think it used to bother Jonny a bit, that so many of our friends, especially on the performance scene, never found their way to the Sit Room for any of the events that he curated there. Sometimes we talk a lot about the kind of space we want, and then when somebody makes it, it turns out we don't particularly value its existence after all. -- Though sometimes, of course, we also just forget how turned-off theatre people are by late modernist poetry...)<br /><br />Well: perhaps before too long we'll find a way of opening up a similar space, in a more sustainable way -- which might mean the 'live' part of live/work is an invitation rather than a compulsion. It'll never be the same, but then I don't want it to be the same, I just want it to respond to the same desires, and I want it to tell us about ourselves by doing so. I know I did quite a lot of my best work at the Sit Room, and I know I did quite a lot of my best living there, too: and perhaps the challenge the Sit Room -- or its disappearance -- throws down, is to figure out how to make every 'room' that room.<br /><br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-tP5aFeGOivA/Uy9xYL5jONI/AAAAAAAAD6U/FM7EEi0jY0M/s1600/40073_418330115924_4948900_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-tP5aFeGOivA/Uy9xYL5jONI/AAAAAAAAD6U/FM7EEi0jY0M/s1600/40073_418330115924_4948900_n.jpg" height="400" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br />(now unsituated)</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><br />Which is probably an apt final thought: but it would seem badly wrong not in fact to end on a simpler note, by saying thank you very much to Jonny for some extraordinary, life-increasing times in that space, in public and in private (and in public <i>while </i>in private). Thanks, man. It was the best, the kindest, room I ever got to know: not least, because that's the room you made it. May something of it stay with you wherever you go, and may something of it stay with me.<br /><br />Chris Goodehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17993698000314709291noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28051672.post-17166356818666229212014-02-25T23:48:00.000+00:002014-02-25T23:48:57.895+00:00Giving it all away<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/bhhOmFwp7tc?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0' /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Roger Daltrey, 'Giving It All Away' (Leo Sayer / David Courtney) 1973</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">So, hey, crew, I'm back: and if you've read the preceding post you'll know that this means I've finished the first draft of my book. I suspect what I feel right now is the feeling people are seeking when they present themselves to be colonically irrigated. Having said that, perhaps when my editor emails back his first thoughts I shall experience the opposite sensation -- which is less sought-after at health farms, I believe, though you never can tell what's going to catch on with rich people: maybe colonic reintroduction will turn out to be this year's treatment of choice. Sometimes I look at Owen Paterson and the reactions he induces in me are very much in that ballpark. I can't imagine wanting to pay for that, but who knows. The things I can't imagine generally do not constitute a useful set of objects and events by which to navigate.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I'm slightly nervous about the post that follows, because I really don't quite know what I'm doing with it, except wanting to say some things, and see how those things look or sound when I stack them up next to each other. I'm wildly unsure where it's going. But I suppose a good way to find out is to start writing and see what happens. I suspect some of it will be a bit uncomfortable, to say the least, for some readers. Well. I'm encouraged by a lovely conversation with Rajni Shah at last month's D&amp;D event. She was talking about the importance (and the happiness -- though I'm certain she didn't say 'happiness' exactly) of thinking aloud, of taking a line (of inquiry) for a walk. And though I think I do that often in my work in the rehearsal room, I feel like I seldom do it in my writing -- not even here, which I guess must be the most hospitable space to which I have access. So: pack Scotch eggs and ginger beer: I'm not sure where this will go, and it might go on a while, but hey, let's go.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">* * *</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I'm starting this post on Thursday 7th February. I'm in Bristol. I'm here for work, but in quite a stretchy sense: my actual obligations are minimal, and it's nice to feel that I have some time for once -- especially since I decided to stay on for an extra day to avoid the London tube strike (which I support 100% but would still rather not have to deal with) -- so I'm really enjoying this space for writing and wandering and trying to follow my mood and my impulses rather than the familiar clunking fist of deadlines and agendas. I love Bristol (these days -- didn't so much when I was growing up here) and it's a good city for wandering in, but I'm aware that what's propelling my wanders this week is not so much an appetite for Bristol -- especially not in this weather -- but a compulsive&nbsp;craving for not-here, for someplace-else.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">This is a phenomenon I've been interested in for some years: that I hardly ever feel, except very late at night at home, that I am in the right place for doing what I want to be doing. That the desk is too cluttered, or my chair's at slightly the wrong height, or I can't breathe properly or think straight where I am. This is the impulse that leads to me having breakfast out so often, for example -- in order to start the day I seem to need to be somewhere other than where I am, in some cafe or restaurant somewhere, where the ceiling is higher or the ambient sound is welcoming and I can hide from my bad self a little bit. Of course, whenever I get there, it's never quite satisfactory, and I want to be in some other elsewhere instead. As I wrote to <a href="http://www.johnhallpoet.org.uk/" target="_blank">John Hall</a> in an email last year:</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><blockquote class="tr_bq">. . . [I]f "[t]he descriptions of cities Marco Polo visited had this virtue: you could wander through them in thought..." [Calvino, <i>Invisible Cities</i>], then does thinking -- perhaps a particular kind of wandering thinking -- produce a sense, or a glimpse perhaps, of a spectrally imagined city, or place, that acts as a site for that thought? I don't know, but it feels as if it may have something to do with a familiar sense that I always want to be -- literally -- somewhere else in order to write. I'll sit at my desk thinking I need to be in the park; will go to the park and wonder if I wouldn't get on better sitting at a table in the pub; the place where writing feels possible is always principally imaginary and seems usually at odds with here, wherever that may be. And if I am writing here, it is often because I have stopped noticing where I am.</blockquote><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">It's not just about writing. A lot of my gallery-going (never as much as I'd love to be able to fit in) is about a craving for the other-space of a gallery rather than wanting to see a particular exhibition. I love walking into gallery spaces: I said on Twitter the other day, and I haven't yet decided I was wrong about this, that when you walk into a gallery, you feel like all the work is facing out towards you; when you walk into most theatres, you feel that the work has its back to you. I love to walk into a place that feels open, except I almost immediately feel that it's all too open and that to get anything done I need to feel more closed in. I went this morning to Arnolfini to check out their present show, which brings together a large body of work by the Belgian artist&nbsp;Joëlle Tuerlinckx, under the slightly annoying title <i><a href="http://www.arnolfini.org.uk/whatson/joelle-tuerlinckx-wor-l-d-k-in-progress" target="_blank">WOR(L)D(K) IN PROGRESS?</a></i>, and found its open-systems assemblage quite a difficult terrain to negotiate because I couldn't make much of the material work on its own or in relation with other elements so I always felt I wanted to be moving on to the next thing -- almost like that feeling of running down hill when you're going a little faster than you want and actually it's your momentum that's dictating the pace, slightly out of sync with your control instincts. Being able to regulate the speed of moving-on, of going somewhere-else, normally feels like the most information-rich part of the situation -- the speed at which you draw the line will to some extent determine the kind of line it's possible to draw.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Often there is desire behind this movement, desire in that weird and enthralling intersection where desire for space meets desire for other bodies. (Few bodies in the Tuerlinckx.) I can't walk around on a wet and windy day like today, with my collar turned up and my hat pulled down, without thinking of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prHtmk7yfuc" target="_blank">Paul Goodman</a>, in the '50s and '60s, going out cruising for very young men in the roughest parts of town, having great high-intellectual thoughts as he trudged through the urban landscape, pulling out a notebook maybe from time to time or filing the idea away for later. (There's a truly profound musing, in his published diaries, on the subject of dogshit on pavements and what it tells us about the erotics of intellection.) There is I think some psychogeographical impetus behind Goodman's yomping -- he was, after all, a great thinker about town planning from a sociological (and temperamentally anarchist) perspective: a great reader, like Debord, of streets and social systems as encodings of each other -- which, again, seems to entwine with and complicate his (already complicated) looking-out for young working-class boys. I'm really not someone who cruises, except in the most sort of flippant or facetious way: whatever I do to follow the routes mapped out in improvisatory fashion by my essentially sarcastic libido, it's in the absolute certainty that nothing would ever come of anything, the glimpse or flicker or sideways glance that, for Goodman, might become the pivot of an entire afternoon. I think I'm not just playing, I'm <i>role</i>-playing, I'm playing at being the sort of person who does this. -- But in a much more generalised sense there's a deep connection, as I walk, between my wanting to walk through the city (and not really arrive anywhere if I can help it), and what might be a vague sense of feeling turned-on.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Like a lot of artists and makers and venues and organizations at the moment, Chris Goode &amp; Company is currently having a pretty hard think about the work we'd like to be able to make, the relationships we'd like to foster, the stories we want to tell over the next few years. One piece that we hoped to be able to realise this spring but that will probably now have to wait for next year is a community project in which we want to ask people to talk to us about the spaces that they'd like to be able to go to and -- in whatever way -- use, in their town or their place of residence, but that they can't go to because those spaces don't exist yet; the building, or the open space, or the recreational site, or whatever, that they'd like to dream into being, not more than a bus ride away from where they live. We're calling the project <i>The Other Place</i>. It's sort of about exactly this sometimes erotic fantasy of wanting to be moving into and through a space of somewhere-else, responding with your body and your imagination to the affordances of a location which is shaped by, or somehow anticipates, and is to some extent activated by, exactly that desire.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Where am I, again? I'm in Bristol this week for the opening, at the Brewery, of Tobacco Factory Theatres' production of my 2008 play <i><a href="http://exeuntmagazine.com/reviews/infinite-lives/" target="_blank">Infinite Lives</a></i>. It's a solo play that's had a few scratchy or singleton outings but not amounted to much until now. I've not been very closely involved in rehearsals and I had nothing much to go on in shaping my expectations around last night's first show, except for true faith in its brilliant young director Nik Partridge and in the actor Ray Scannell, whom I didn't know before now and who seems to me to be really superb. What I hadn't seen or heard <i>at all&nbsp;</i>was any of the audiovisual material that the script calls for, and which has been developed for this production by animator / projection designer Alex Wright and sound designer <a href="http://www.timatack.co.uk/" target="_blank">Timothy X Atack</a> (whose superlative work with <a href="http://sleepdogs.org/" target="_blank">Sleepdogs</a> I've kept the best possible eye on without ever actually having seen any, ridiculously). It's those challenging technical aspects that I think have been one of the principal reasons why <i>Infinite Lives </i>has never had a full production until now: what I ask for in the text is complex and hard-to-do (especially without a big budget). And one strand of it is particularly fraught, as <i>Infinite Lives </i>is a story about a thirtysomething man who falls in love with a much younger guy who models for an online live-cam porn site, and whose name he believes to be Carlos. The play comes from that period in my work where I was <i>exceedingly </i>(even more than I am now) agitated about and fixated upon the under-explored capacity of theatre and live performance to be way bolder than it normally is in its presentation of sex; but not only does the script ask for an unusual level of explicitness, it also has a lot to say -- one way and another -- about who 'Carlos' is, how he looks, how he might behave. Carlos, in other words, has always been a <i>problem</i>.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">It was only once last night's first performance of <i>Infinite Lives </i>had got underway and I had started kind of silently gurgling with pleasure (and not a little relief) at how good the projections and the music and sound design were, that I suddenly realised that I was about to see Carlos realised on screen for the first time. I had been careful not to set my expectations too high: it felt like sort of a miracle that it was happening at all, that the moment I'd been dreading -- "we've decided we'd rather do it without Carlos than do it with Carlos and it not really work": that moment -- had never come. And then suddenly we were at that juncture in the play where we get to see him for the first time: and I couldn't quite believe what I was seeing. At the risk of sounding like a terrible old luvvie (I can use that word, you can't, OK?, it's like the n-word of showbiz): that person sliding into view on screen? <i>It was Carlos</i>. In every way, his look, his gestures, his physicality, his tone, his mode of self-performance: it was as if someone had stuck a USB cable into my left anterior cingulate cortex in January 2008, downloaded my imagining of Carlos onto a memory stick, and then uploaded it into After Effects six years later. The truth -- that, by means unknown to me, the production team had come across the (evidently massively talented) dancer <a href="http://vimeo.com/46610467" target="_blank">Murilo Leite</a>, and persuaded him to let himself be filmed in a range of excitatory scenarios -- is no less mindblowing, in its way.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">And so, today was tinted, rather gorgeously, by the lingering afterimage of Carlos (and a fun Twitter exchange with Murilo), and a sense -- to pick up a language that Jonny Liron and I used to make use of a whole lot -- of having been wounded, of there being some psychic and erotic imprint that is continually pressing itself into your heart and mind, and pushing on the step-after-step of walking through a beautiful, and beautifully familiar, city, and incubating the mild euphoria of suddenly being alive in a place and time where Carlos is a plausible reality, a real-life friend-of-a-friend, and where someone as special as Murilo has the generosity and composure to let himself be seen in that context. (I should say I suppose that the imagery in the production is not, actually, as explicit as the script implies it might be at some moments, though I suspect that Nik has judged it exactly right in terms of what is and isn't seen, and certainly I feel that my wishes for that aspect of the play have been respected, carefully but adventurously and kind of joyously.)</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-wvz7cgJEiEQ/UvPm2lo2qOI/AAAAAAAAD40/jhKtp8FKl2E/s1600/inf_lives_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-wvz7cgJEiEQ/UvPm2lo2qOI/AAAAAAAAD40/jhKtp8FKl2E/s1600/inf_lives_.jpg" height="300" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ray Scannell (front) and Murilo Leite (projection) in <i>Infinite Lives </i><br />dir. Nik Partridge, Brewery Theatre, Bristol<br />Photo: Paul Blakemore</td></tr></tbody></table><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">This is all by way of leading up to wanting to tell you about something really beautiful I saw a few weeks ago; by way of context, I suppose, or some kind of earthing, because I don't know that you'll think what I'm describing is beautiful. I imagine you might think it's horrible.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Starting to think again last summer about <i>Infinite Lives</i>, five years after its first scratchy appearance on stage, sent me back to a world from which I'd become almost totally estranged -- the world of online cam shows, to which I was a frequent visitor in around 2006-07 (just as broadband speeds became fast enough for the experience not to be unremittingly frustrating): I came for the hot boys but stayed for the whole elaborate ecosystem of it, the chatrooms, the etiquette, the syntax, the contract, and, of course, underneath all these, the ethics and the ideological conundra that led me to want to write the play in the first place. But though I was fascinated by that online space and its dynamics, it was hard to stay attached to it: expensive, for one thing; also the site I liked best was based in Canada which meant the live shows (which were what I wanted -- the repeats were not nearly so interesting, despite being superficially identical in every respect) didn't start till 11pm GMT and often the guys I wanted to watch weren't on till the 3am or 5am slots, which wasn't too compatible with the no-less-urgent desire to be productive in the world and meet friends in the world in daylight hours and so on.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">But when the possibility of <i>Infinite Lives </i>being given a full production was floated last summer, I remembered that on <a href="http://chrisgoodeandco.podbean.com/2013/05/05/thompsons-live-series-2-episode-3-6th-may-2013/" target="_blank">a recent episode of the Thompson's Live podcast</a>, my brilliant chum the director <a href="http://www.blackburncompany.org/" target="_blank">Nick Blackburn</a> had talked a bit about liking very much a free cam site called Cam4 -- so I took a look at it, and ended up at a near clone of&nbsp;that site,&nbsp;called <a href="http://chaturbate.com/male-cams/" target="_blank">Chaturbate</a>&nbsp;<i>[NSFW link]</i>: which must be the most repellent name I've ever heard for anything ever ever, with the possible exception of a local hair salon called 'Your Beautiful' [<em>sic</em>; my beautiful <em>what?</em>]: but the site itself really repaid those first attentions and I've been a not-infrequent visitor ever since. A nice aspect of Chaturbate (like Cam4) is that it exists principally to facilitate connections between amateur users who get to set their own parameters and rules of engagement. Anyone can broadcast themselves doing anything they're comfortable doing (within the Ts&amp;Cs) and anyone who wants to watch can do so for free, so the bit where money changes hands is opt-in: users of the site can buy tokens with which they can then 'tip' performers; some tips are made as gratuities by way of thanks for good and faithful service, but often the performers will advertise a kind of tariff (for this&nbsp;many tokens I'll do <em>x</em> with <em>y </em>until <em>z </em>-- ah, the erotics of algebra). Performers can then cash in their received tokens when they want. Models are thumbnailed on the home page in order of present viewing figures, and it's easy to see what the market values most highly -- in the 'male' section, endless nearly-identical Colombian teenagers (legal ones, <i>it says here</i>) and stoned thirtysomething rednecks with cocks roughly the thickness of full-grown green anacondas: these stars will have anything up to a couple of thousand viewers at any one time (and loads more, of course, for the hetero stuff); but it's always worth scrolling through the first few pages to get to those shows that only four or six people in the whole wide world are watching: there are bearded septuagenarians from (I'm guessing) Lake Wobegon, emerging Buddha-like from&nbsp;their woodwork overalls;&nbsp;and fat Swiss real estate agents who look dismally like, er,&nbsp;me; and I once spent a very happy half hour in the 'company' of a German man dressed top-to-tail as a dragon, who mostly wanted to talk about software. There's one guy who seems to spend most of every working day masturbating in his office, with a camera trained on his poor overworked genitals; and a couple who broadcast from their (parked) cars. Thus it's a space in which seasoned pros (the Colombian cohort is obviously a super-slick factory operation) and stumbling bedroom exhibitionists exist cheek-by-(probably-not-exactly)-jowl, and super-cute ever-ready boyband wannabes line up alongside obese New York orthodontists whose winkies haven't even been discernible since the dog days of the Carter administration. Compared with most professional video sites, the range of body types and ages and ethnicities makes it all look much more like jury service. -- And all of this happens, I should say, within a system that's highly regulated in terms of conduct and etiquette, rather more so even than the semi-fictitious site I describe in <i>Infinite Lives</i>. Moderators patrol the chat and anyone who 'shouts' (in CAPS) or is consistently impolite is quickly booted out. It's not even really OK to ask a model to do something without tipping them in advance. There is often a low level of friendly bantering chat but even here the models are well-protected: so I don't think I've ever felt, as I often did at that old site a few years back, that there was anything abusive or even exploitative going on. Evidently there is prestige these days in fiercely protecting the model first and pleasing the customer second (which is exactly as it should be).</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">That's the context in which I met -- and in a sense am still meeting -- Charlie. (That's not <i>quite </i>his screen name.) Charlie's&nbsp;eighteen years old&nbsp;and he's a student somewhere in Scotland -- sensibly he doesn't say exactly where -- and I happened to watch his first ever appearance on Chaturbate. He was just chatting on cam, fully clothed, with some music on in the background, in a small bedroom that totally reminded me of the attic room I lived in in a shared house in Cambridge for a year or so after I graduated from uni. He had dyed blue hair and an unutterably sweet smile and a friendly and unassuming manner, and he wasn't accepting tips because he wasn't going to actually 'do' anything. He kept saying, with perfect equanimity, that anyone who was wanting a show should go and look somewhere else because he wasn't here to do that, he was just hanging out and chatting. And slowly, but inexorably, Charlie's warm, laid-back, gently flirtatious hanging-out crept up the rankings to become one of that afternoon's most-watched channels. There was some mild encouragement, especially among those who arrived as the broadcast went on, from those who wanted to cajole Charlie into this act or that divulgence, but he would politely and amusedly bat all this away.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">And so it went, for a while. And then Charlie obviously started to wonder what would happen if, instead of saying no, he said yes. Not yes to anything crazy or off-the-chart. Just yes to the next thing. Yes, I suppose I don't mind unbuttoning my shirt. Yes, you can see my feet if you really want, why on earth would you want to but why not. Why not.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">And you can probably imagine what happens next. As fans pour in, and Charlie gets more and more of a kick out of their delighted responses to his small careful concessions -- which have the feeling of gifts, acts of kindness, little treats, rather than wilful assertion or throwing-down or fabulous look-at-me luxuriations -- something starts to shift. It feels -- I want to say 'weirdly', though I don't know why it would be weird, really -- it feels, weirdly or not, like the building of trust, between a sweet good-natured teenager in a dreary bedsit somewhere in Scotland, and three-dozen, then a hundred, then three-hundred strangers present in name alone, some of them asking -- almost all with great courtesy and good humour -- if he'll be so kind as to say yes to the next thing, and the next.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I think the show must have gone on, in the end, for eight or nine hours, though I know there was a break in the middle for an hour or so when Charlie had to pop out for a bit. (That was nice -- that he was obviously the sort of person who had errands to run, or had got a bit hungry. You don't get that on Bel Ami.) I just let it run in the background as I sat at my desk and wrote stuff. I'd check in every so often and see where things had got to. I had to pop out for a while as well. Everything felt very casual.) And at some point, without my really noticing, the site crashed and the feed went down for a while.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">By the end of the day, Charlie had a fanbase -- already nicknamed Charlie's Angels -- and he was talking to them&nbsp;still with the same sweetness but also with an instinctive fan-pleasing sense of performed (and perhaps somehow genuine) affection -- <i>I've really got to go now, but I'll miss you all, you guys, and I'll see you all again tomorrow</i> -- and a sort of implicit acknowledgement that he ought to start seeing himself as someone with a marketable talent. These few hours on from his low-key, carefully boundaried start, we had seen Charlie naked, we'd watched him masturbate (though annoyingly, after all that, I didn't see him come), he'd shown everyone his asshole, he'd put odd bits of clothing on in a playfully fetishy sort of way, he'd talked a bit about his personal life and his sexual preferences, and he'd dealt kindly and patiently with an endlessly renewing stream of visitors for whom his Scottishness was a mind-boggling novelty. (What do you wear under your kilt, Charlie? <i>Nothing, of course.</i>&nbsp;What are your views on Scottish independence? <i>I don't think it's a good idea but I haven't really thought about it much.</i>&nbsp;What do you wear under your kilt, Charlie? etc.)</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Charlie still goes on Chaturbate a bit, though not as often as he did -- once a week, now, maybe, at weekends. His hair went from blue to red for a while and now it's blond. Something a little practised underscores his shows now. (I think about how much less I like Eddie Izzard these days, since he developed such a hard-edged comprehension of what made him funny.) There is a big notice on Charlie's room page about buying him stuff off of his Amazon wish-list, by way of recompense for his performances: and why not? An exchange of gifts. That seems right. But I'm wondering whether anything will ever match the intensity of the brief period of transition where he was starting to test his own limits -- <i>what happens if I say yes to this?</i> -- without wanting to get tipped for it: where there was a genuine and (temporarily) sufficient pleasure in being desired. In being asked. In having people say: you're so beautiful, what more can you show us? Was that intensity I experienced something to do with the intimacy of watching an apparently genuine personal reflectiveness and movement, supported by the quiet encouragement of a bunch of strangers? Was that intensity about the exchange not being monetised? Or was it an intensity pressurized by injustice and exploitation and fake markers of consent and authorship?</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I'd be more worried had Charlie never come back to Chaturbate after that first ecstatic eight-hour day; but I'm aware nonetheless of a kind of sadness or disappointment -- very mildly present, but certainly enough to detect -- that he did come back, and often enough to become so much more aware of what he was doing, of how it was all framed, of what was and is and wasn't and isn't seen, and of how -- you might argue -- a mutually exploitative situation can feel like one in which all the exploitation cancels itself out.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I'm looking at Charlie, and I'm thinking about actors.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">* * *</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Man, I think Travis Mathews must be some kind of genius. His extraordinary film <i>I Want Your Love </i>(the full-length version, following a short from 2010) was maybe the best movie I saw last year: it sits somewhere in the territory of Andrew Haigh's <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GYFIwAURH4" target="_blank">Weekend</a></i>, which I love and revere (I wrote about it in my<a href="http://beescope.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/seasons-greeblings-and-another-year.html" target="_blank"> year's end post in 2011</a>), but complicates its candid and profoundly truthful intimacies with something even deeper, an attachment to registering the scuffy and convulsive parts of our lives, when the narrative we're living becomes unclear even (or especially) to ourselves. I haven't seen that mystifying-yet-recognizable, almost aleatoric quality in such a naturalistic lo-fi film since Kelly Reichardt's tenderly upsetting <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tL1X_7jIcIM" target="_blank">Old Joy</a></i>&nbsp;in 2006. Following <i>I Want Your Love </i>up, I found out about Mathews's <i>In Their Room </i>series, in which he films self-identified gay men in their bedrooms, hanging out, chatting, 'getting ready', being sexual; I've only seen clips and fragments but I adore these little glimpses into the subjects' lives and desires: the blatantly collaborative nature of the films as portraits, and the way their performative qualities really sing out of the documentary format, seem to me to make them really suggestive triggers for thinking about private versus public and the ways in which personal desires meet social ethics. There is something in Travis Mathews's approach and his evident concerns, and the integrity with which he appears to pursue his ideas and the relationships through which he realises those ideas, that feels very close to the kind of theatre practice that I most identify with at the moment: the way in which talking to people about their lives, and listening very closely to the answers, and creating a space in which intimate and truthful action can arise out of those conversations, produces work that is, on the one hand, rigorous in its engagements and its availability to critique, and at the same time is warmly humane and tender and funny, and difficult in the way that people and sex are, not just in the way that language and critical praxis and negative dialectics are. I really like how both <i>I Want Your Love </i>and <i>In Their Room </i>seem able to transcend the nicheness of some queer performance by being really specific about the gay lives and the queer identities they're focusing on: there is something about the valuing of particular details and individual personalities that becomes enlarging rather than parochialising.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="281" mozallowfullscreen="" src="//player.vimeo.com/video/61477223" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="500"></iframe> </div><div style="text-align: center;"></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://vimeo.com/61477223"><span style="font-size: x-small;">IN THEIR ROOM LONDON teaser (NSFW)</span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"> from </span><a href="http://vimeo.com/travismathews"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Travis Mathews</span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"> on </span><a href="https://vimeo.com/"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Vimeo</span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;">.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Mathews's most high-profile project to date, however, is certainly <em><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGOdpdxyS_0" target="_blank">Interior. Leather Bar.</a></em>, which he co-directs with the ubiquitous and endlessly confounding James Franco. If you haven't heard about this film, it's a high-concept proposition, not quite a one-liner but not far off. There's a notorious (&amp;, many think, ropey) William Friedkin film from 1980 called <em><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGOdpdxyS_0" target="_blank">Cruising</a></em>, starring Al Pacino as a cop who has to go undercover on the New York gay S&amp;M scene in pursuit of a serial killer. The film excited protests at the time from the gay community, who found the film savagely homophobic in its apparently hostile depiction of the S&amp;M subculture; but other queer viewers, I know, were grateful -- as so many of us were, well into the nineties (and perhaps still are) -- for <em>any</em> representation, any recognizable or halfway realistic depiction of gay culture and sexuality. At any rate, in order to get the film passed by the MPAA (the American equivalent of the BBFC), Friedkin had to cut forty minutes of footage, which is said to have consisted of explicit sexual material from the club scenes. It's this unseen excised material that catches the imagination of Franco, who is, creditably,&nbsp;much concerned with how contemporary cinema presents sex, and the parameters that determine what can or can't be seen (and what can or can't be made) by consenting adults.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">So <em>Interior. Leather Bar. </em>originates in an impulse of critical speculation: what might that missing material have looked like? But while Mathews &amp; Franco's film may have started with that question -- and the record ought to show that Franco brought Mathews on board to help realise the film he was already interested in making, Franco having seen <em>I Want Your Love </em>and been impressed by Mathews's presentation of unsimulated sex in that movie -- it has become, in its fully developed version, a far more complex and teasing construction. It's a fiction-documentary following the making of that reconstructive film -- a process of making that happens only in so far as it creates the focus for the 'documentary'. So, we get some sequences of those club scenes, edited and post-produced, but we also get to see them being filmed in a tiny downtown space, and we get to see backstage at the filming, and to follow some of the process leading up to the filming. In particular we watch Franco's real-life acting buddy Val Lauren talking with Franco and Mathews about the project: they want him to play the lead -- and he certainly does have startling redolences of the young Pacino&nbsp; -- but he's not at all sure about the sexually explicit nature of the material they'll be focusing on, especially as a heterosexual actor who instinctively wants to draw the line somewhere before they get to the point of filming him having real sex with another man, but isn't at all sure where <em>precisely </em>that line needs to be drawn. And so we follow the wobbly trajectories of his uncertainty, his wrestling with the boundaries of (his own private) sexual normativity, and the orthodoxies of film-making and career-building; he talks to other actors on the set, who are more relaxed than he is, or less so, and are drawing the same line in different places. Above all we watch him repeatedly return to a basic allegiance to Franco: Lauren wants to give this project everything he can, not because it's something that particularly interests him or appeals to his own creative instincts, but because he recognizes that Franco is a significant creative talent -- and an influential one in the industry -- and he sees it as part of his complex role as an actor and as a friend-of-James to set aside his own misgivings as far as possible in order to support Franco's perceived artistry.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">All of this is played so authentically that it is incredibly easy to forget, from moment to moment, and within seconds of being reminded (as the film repeatedly and assiduously does), that you're watching a totally constructed event. Which is not to say that there is not a core of reality here -- Lauren's struggle with the challenges being thrown up by the project seems to be totally authentic, and in so far as some of the sex that we watch certainly is real, so we can assume is the anxiety around it. But we are also inside an authored event. A few times, for example, we see scripts, held in hands or sitting on tables, and it becomes clear that that script is not for what we might call the film-within-the-film, but for the film itself, the one we're watching. One particularly giddy moment has Lauren sitting against the wall outside the film set, reading aloud to himself the description in the screenplay of him sitting against this very wall in this very scene: which means that we then hear him read the whole paragraph again, because he's just read that direction aloud, thus transforming it into&nbsp;a speech. (Geddit?) Nothing, really, could make it clearer that Franco and Mathews -- one rather suspects more Mathews than Franco, though I've no evidence for that -- are interested in confecting a sort of dynamic conundrum that will raise and frame a whole bunch of questions about authorship and control and allegiance and trust, at the core of which vortex are a few short filmed sequences of real power-play sex between men, so that the sex also blares its embedded questions about authorship and control and allegiance and trust. Fascinatingly, Franco, who is seen throughout most of the film, wielding a handheld camera or talking intelligently with Lauren and the other actors, disappears towards the end of the movie. He just isn't around any more. Where has he vanished to? The suggestion in the film is that he's gone to hang out somewhere else, on the circuit with some cool folks. Or is he just behind the camera? Of course, again, it's all a set-up, playing smartly on popular perceptions of Franco as&nbsp;some homo-curious&nbsp;dilettante art-school&nbsp;motherfucker: but there's something interesting in the removal from the system of Lauren's rationale for testing his own boundaries as an actor. What does it mean to be willing to maybe do something you're not comfortable with, <em>for </em>someone you respect, in pursuit of <em>their </em>vision which is not your own? And what, if anything, continues to hold the space of that dedicated rationale when said friend is suddenly absent? The vanishing of Franco towards the end of <em>Interior. Leather Bar. </em>reminds me, more than anything, of Blake, the Kurt Cobain cipher played by Michael Pitt in Gus Van Sant's best film <em>Last Days</em>. Blake keeps slipping out of frame -- falling out of a shot that won't move to catch him, or just wandering off dissociatively -- and the charismatic absence of him says a good deal more about the radioactivity of stardom than the (admittedly gorgeously hokey) final sequence where Dead Blake becomes a fine-art nude ascending a stairway to heaven.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I talked before Christmas to <a href="http://www.nigelandlouise.com/" target="_blank">Nigel Barrett</a>, who's about to come to Plymouth with me as part of the ensemble for <em><a href="http://www.theatreroyal.com/whats-on/2014/mad-man/" target="_blank">MAD MAN</a></em>, about ideas sort of along these lines. Nigel's one of the most extraordinary actors I've ever had the privilege to work with: seemingly fearless, certainly effervescently clever and inventive and brilliantly generous and warm and positive and kind. He was talking very interestingly and rather movingly about his perception of himself as someone whose principal talent is in making himself available for use by people who have a stronger or more singular <em>creative</em> vision than he does himself. This is not, as he sees it -- and I think, or hope, he's right -- in any way a secondary role in the process. He just wants to put himself at the disposal of others: to a great extent he asks of himself only that he does as best he can what others ask of him. This is certainly a perspective that Jonny [Liron] has articulated to me in the past, as well, this sense of asking either me (<i>qua</i> director) or an audience: <em>where do you want to go today? </em>And I suppose it also brings to mind a really impressive conversation I had at D&amp;D a few years back with the actor and translator Aliki Chapple, in whose earshot I was fulminating a bit stridently (I expect) about the idea -- maybe slightly less current now than it was then, but not by much -- that the director of a stage text is there to 'serve' the writer. I was really cross about the paradigm of 'service' (as opposed to, say, collaboration), about the blatant -- though not, actually, unshakeable -- implication of 'subservience'. But Aliki's hugely cogent dismissal of that objection came from outside the rehearsal room: she talked about her young son, about her sense that she 'serves' him, places herself in a relationship of service to his best interests. I found Aliki's comment jarring, at the time, but I thought about it a lot afterwards, and it's had a really (re-)formative impact on my thinking around these questions. I do think, in the work at least, the sense of service has to travel in all directions, but it is an interesting and provoking language to drop in to the negotiation of making-relationships.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">When I think about the occasions when&nbsp;actors -- brilliant, intrepid colleagues -- have reminded me that they are there to serve my directorial vision, it's both exciting and discomfiting. Very often it's something that's said in the heat of a conversation about the things I feel nervous or conflicted about asking actors to do -- more often than not, then, it's about nudity, or sexual content, or both. They very kindly want to reassure me that it's OK for me to ask them those questions; sometimes they want to pre-empt them by making sure I know they're up for anything, or at least for a conversation about anything. And -- as John says in <em>Infinite Lives </em>-- "I do quite want": and while I'm cautious about becoming over-comfortable with or blase about&nbsp;that openness and willingness, I do still basically trust in the strategy we put in place (though Lord knows we didn't always execute it competently) during the negotiations around&nbsp;the making of <em>Hey Mathew </em>in 2008: wilful, insistent, vigilant transparency at all times: naming the desire, naming the complications, naming the fear, naming the obstacles, trying to name the hidden variables and the obscured field dynamics, and making a nameable decision from within the tangly midst of all that Naming Of Parts.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Still -- as I've said in the chapter on nudity in my upcoming book -- I don't much trust the tariffs of 'artistic' value that surround so much discussion on the subject, the bargaining that tries to account for, say,&nbsp;the level of professionalism involved in the project, or the artistic merit, or the motivation of the character in psychological-realistic terms.&nbsp;(The confusing conjugational litany of weighing-up that&nbsp;goes something like: "I am a professional artist; you have an Evening Standard award; my character wouldn't ever do that; we are all on minimum wage", etc.)&nbsp;I hate the idea that the actor is obliged to place themselves, more or less in a state of abstraction, into&nbsp;the fractious internal economy of art -- of the body <em>in </em>or <em>as </em>art -- as an industrial engine. Some things are too important, too precious, to sell, I piously say: and those things, you have to give away. (Which will call to mind for some equally sentimental readers the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUcthgfYDVA" target="_blank">weepy scene in </a><em><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUcthgfYDVA" target="_blank">Harold and Maude</a> </em>where Maude throws Harold's keepsake gift to her into the ocean so that she'll always know where it is.)</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Perhaps it is different in film than it is in theatre. There is always the persistence of the object in film. Look at all the Google hits for Val Lauren that show him in <em>Interior. Leather Bar.,</em> but that don't -- that can't -- show up the ambivalences that make his role in that film so vibrantly powerful; they just capture him in a black vest looking kind of sexy and kind of gay and boringly unambiguous. Lauren's defining relationship in the film is with Franco, but I find it more instructive to think of him in relation to Mathews. What is at stake in <em>that </em>relationship? I think about how I often say to actors, especially those I haven't worked with before, that I often feel my role is split exactly 50/50 between making sure they're always comfortable, and making sure they're always uncomfortable. It is impossible, for both of us, to live in that space: but the contradiction is informative, and sort of shapely, and it can become a way of moving, a way of always moving on to the next someplace-else. In that sense,&nbsp;<em>Interior. Leather Bar. </em>is, I think, perhaps the best film I know about acting (or first-equal perhaps with <em><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooVAo8FIpXw" target="_blank">Vanya on 42nd Street</a></em>): and I say that in the knowledge that it is also, to some considerable extent,&nbsp;a film about sadomasochism; and sadomasochism, like acting, is one of the ways we've devised for thinking about how we can make our immense capacity for erotic love matter more.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I'm looking at Val Lauren, and I'm thinking about love.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5MXg51Gmc0U/UvgL_6Lu1AI/AAAAAAAAD5E/lvEQ8N5AhWo/s1600/78745507.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5MXg51Gmc0U/UvgL_6Lu1AI/AAAAAAAAD5E/lvEQ8N5AhWo/s1600/78745507.jpg" height="266" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Val Lauren and Christian Patrick in <em>Interior. Leather Bar. </em><br />(dir. James Franco &amp; Travis Mathews, 2013)</td></tr></tbody></table><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">* * *</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Also in that book-chapter on nudity I mention a provocation with which I sometimes ask consenting actors to engage: once you're naked -- once you've "got" naked -- how can you carry on getting <em>more </em>naked? How can you extend the line, the curve, however you imagine it, on the graph of clothedness, how can you extend the line back through its own origin to sub-zero? To a degree, the expressibility of the question is suggestive enough in itself: my own interest in staged nakedness as a research question --&nbsp;rather than merely as a signal or a tonal modifier that I simply liked to introduce into the aesthetic and erotic world of the work -- began with&nbsp;two late recognitions that seemed to speak to each other: one, that I was more interested in the movement of 'getting naked' rather than the state of being naked, I found something more dynamic (perhaps obviously) in the vector than in the static image; two, that I didn't want to think any more of nakedness as a limit state, which seemed to inscribe it into a position of extremity rather than root-position centrality. And even though it mostly isn't practical to work in a way that reflects this, I still see the actor -- certainly the professional or self-professed actor, and perhaps the actor whoever-they-may-be in a moment of action -- as a special kind of person whose body is engaged in speculative action (research action, I suppose I think of it as), not outside of place but&nbsp;in a critical relationship with it,&nbsp;and whose default should be nakedness rather than a state of being clothed.&nbsp;(This, I realise, is a very elliptical account of a position that's hard to explain concisely; at the risk of sounding like a colossal -- or tiny -- dick: if you're interested, have a look at the book when it comes out -- I'm able to take more time over it there. I was worried the position would unravel as I described it, but in fact it made me more sure of it, and more excited by its radical promise, than ever.)</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I've been thinking a lot about that question this year in relation to a book that was one of my (far too many) Christmas presents to myself. It's a book I first became aware of thanks to a fascinating and truly thoughtful review of it by my old mate the novelist / poet / critic / blogger / paragon of awesomeness Thomas Moore. Do read <a href="http://thefanzine.com/age-as-disease-nick-haymess-gabe/" target="_blank">Tom's review</a>, it's far more close-to-the-bone than I imagine I'm going to be in the words that follow. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The book in question is <em><a href="http://nickhaymes.com/books/gabe-/" target="_blank">Gabe</a></em>, by the photographer <a href="http://nickhaymes.com/hello/" target="_blank">Nick Haymes</a>. It's simply -- and <em>in no way </em>simply -- a volume of photographs, taken across a period of about four years, of one individual: the actor-slash-nonactor Gabe Nevins, whom, if you know him at all, you'd most likely recognize from his lead role as a sweetly, blearily fucked-up skateboarding teen in Gus Van Sant's&nbsp;<em><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkMDs3FXVzg" target="_blank">Paranoid Park</a></em>. I thought Nevins was stunning in that role (notwithstanding Van Sant's ineffable talent for filming young men and boys-becoming-men as if only he can truly discern the swirling phantom universes of pain and desire that animate and stupefy them) and it was both a surprise that he didn't immediately go on to superstardom and the cover of <em>i-D</em> and, at the same time, no surprise at all that he dropped out of sight.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">But now here he is, in these hundred-odd photos by Nick Haymes -- plus adjunct documentation: the odd email to Harmony Korine ("i would do ANYTHING under your direction") or Facebook status update ("I'd like some citrus with this disguise, tell me what is wise", he says -- which sounds like it must be a song lyric, maybe, but I don't recognize it and can't turn it up: anybody know?). At the front end of the book, in his mid-teens, here he is, goofily turning somersaults, blowing blue bubble-gum, skating, flossing, endlessly taking his shirt off, dressing up as a nun; and then, a third of the way through the book, beginning what I guess most commentators would (perhaps fairly) describe as a 'descent': a lonelier, more convulsive, un-cute kind of mayhem, pretty much blaring a whole delirious fanfare of recreational drug use; putting on masks and make-up, posing for Larry Clark-esque pics with an Asian dominatrix; wearing less and less, more and more: just pantyhose; just a sock over his dick; then no sock. And then, once he's naked, getting more naked: wearing nothing but the glitches of a fucked-up digital video image; nothing but the cover of darkness; nothing but his eyes rolled back in his head, the weirdness and wiredness of too many sleepless nights bearing with too many chemical messages, illicit and otherwise; perhaps most strikingly, and disconcertingly, wearing the intense nakedness of a nasty outbreak of psoriasis. And there he is naked, again: just totally, straight-down-the-line naked, again and again.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">It doesn't help -- or maybe, in a way, it does -- that this trajectory continues (or so we can easily discover) beyond the confines of this book: just as with <em>Interior. Leather Bar.</em>, this project is essentially a docu-drama, neither straight documentary nor secluded fiction: but the documentary aspect is where the intimacy starts to feel perhaps a bit frightening, as the pictorial reportage start to tell together the story of Nevins's life as a young adult: what starts within the book as drugs and hustling and restlessness ends up outside its covers as homelessness and a spell in jail. Which leaves behind an unsettling (and in some sense unresolvable) set of questions about what this book is, what it records, what it constructs, how it responds, what it authors. There is no sense of non-consent -- Nevins is totally open to and turned towards the presence of Haymes and his camera; and yet, how safe an infrastructure is consent? A signature on a release form is a kind of consent; friendship is a kind of consent; keeping on going back is a kind of consent; but we all know kids of thirteen who should be allowed to vote and adults of thirty-six who don't have the emotional maturity to be able to consent meaningfully to sex or marriage or even dinner; we all know that you can consent to stuff in one country or one state (I mean US state but see also emotional state, state of intoxication, etc.) and drive across a border to a place where that consent is now impossible, unrecognisable. Non-human animals can't consent to any of the uses to which we put them, though plenty of people who forge domestic or working relationships with animals will insist that they could and would consent if they had at their disposal the language formats with which to do so. In some of these pictures, Nevins is (categorically) like an animal, I think.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-16txhbp9Im0/Uw0cFBoGH6I/AAAAAAAAD5U/MG3vWijoyxU/s1600/gabebooktearscans015_large_2000x2000.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-16txhbp9Im0/Uw0cFBoGH6I/AAAAAAAAD5U/MG3vWijoyxU/s1600/gabebooktearscans015_large_2000x2000.jpg" height="262" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Spread from <i>Gabe </i>by Nick Haymes, featuring Gabe Nevins</td></tr></tbody></table><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: white;">I was interested in Haymes's <em>Gabe </em>project because I've often taken an interest in the curious, negotiative relationships that sometimes propel long-form one-on-one projects between photographers and models, and especially between male photographers (who may or may not be gay) and their male subjects (who may or may not be straight). </span>The negotiations that those projects necessarily contain and dramatize seem to me to be very pure -- I don't mean morally pure, I mean concentrated -- relational dialogues about desire and testimony, gift and acceptance, value and gratuity, friendship and romance, intimacy and exposure, privacy and publicity, et cetera: in other words, they feel like exercises in the configuration of the essential theatrical encounter. Sometimes they've formed quite direct models, I suppose, for my own practice;&nbsp;I've often worked with self-identified straight male performers and asked them to respond to or situate themselves in a performative relation with my self-identified queer perspective as a maker. <a href="http://www.bruceweber.com/" target="_blank">Bruce Weber</a>'s adoption of Peter Johnson as his muse for the project recorded in his (absolutely wonderful) film <em><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CV6QswQiQ74" target="_blank">Chop Suey</a> </em>and the accompanying book <em>The Chop Suey Club</em> was a direct inspiration for making my 2003 show <em><a href="http://www.thestage.co.uk/reviews/review.php/1383/his-horses" target="_blank">his horses</a> </em>with Theron Schmidt, while Greg Gorman's extraordinary photographic relationship with the (heterosexual but eyewateringly intrepid) model Greg Knudson, as charted in Gorman's <i><a href="http://www.faheykleingallery.com/photographers/gorman/exhibition/just_between_us/gorman_ex_just_frames.htm" target="_blank">Just Between Us</a></i>, was in the room from day one working with Jonny Liron on <em>Hey Mathew</em>. In both cases there was something really strong about presenting not only those brilliant photographs to my friends as stimulus in themselves, but also looking at them as bodies of work recording the exploratory nature of those collaborations. But it quickly becomes disconcertingly tangly. Look, I'm saying: here are some cool guys who didn't mind being looked at by other guys. Look how much fun they seem to be having. Look at Greg Knudson jerking off: how could anyone not want to be him and/or look at him? And in saying those things in those moments to those collaborating performers, I am reporting in a fairly direct and unvarnished way my own response to some work that I find genuinely interesting and exciting and worthy of consideration as exemplary productions; but that duck is obviously also a rabbit: I am trying to persuade my friends, whom I love and respect, to do something that, one way or another, takes some persuasion. I don't <em>think </em>I have the power apparatus to tip that vocabulary of persuasion into a form of coercion, though perhaps friendship has that tendency in it anyway. In this situation, I don't even think about the mechanism of consent. Consent shows up as the pinpoint punctuation marks in this liquid prosody. I think more about how it feels in the room. I think about how we are moving together. I think about -- and try to ask, carefully, about -- what the conversation is like for them.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I've been having exactly this conversation, lately -- not by any means for the first time -- with an actor who's also someone I value very much as a friend (though I hope it doesn't substantially matter that he's a friend -- I mean, it does, but I hope I'd treat a stranger the same way). He knows I like placing naked actors on stage; he doesn't show any sign of being morally offended (or aesthetically displeased) by that, but he'd rather not be one of them, personally: and for the moment, that's slightly thwarting something I'd love to be able to make. His "no" -- it goes without saying, though I also want to spell it out -- totally overrules my "please": but it's not framed as an <em>absolute "</em>no", just "no" for now -- so we agree&nbsp;there's a conversation to be had, though I appreciate we may not be equally eager to have it. For my part, of course, I find the possibility that sits in this conversation more exciting in a way&nbsp;than I'd have found it if he'd said "yeah, no problem" right from the start. I'm excited by the idea of us moving together through the conversation. But there is a profound contradiction, or an ambiguity, which I take to have to do with my job, my role as director, though perhaps it's not tied to that or explained by it: perhaps those are just the structural conditions that allow that ambiguity to come through clearly. It seems to me, at any rate, that there are two responses to that actor's provisional or contingent "no" that are equally plausible as ethically engaged reactions: one is, "I totally respect that and let's drop the subject"; the other is, "Can we talk about howcome you feel that way?" Obviously, beneath the second lies an agenda that could hardly be described as hidden: if you tell me why you feel like that, maybe I can change your mind: and perhaps that's the bit that makes me feel queasy about myself and my position. Yet I genuinely feel that, particularly in respect of theatre, and in respect of what I think acting is, there is a nearly absolute moral good to the position of feeling able to be naked on stage, to be seen naked. (The reverse is not true, I think: being unwilling to be naked is not a moral deficiency. But at any rate not all theatre situations are the same of course and in fact most of the situations where actors <em>are </em>seen naked on stage or in performance are ones where I think they shouldn't be: which is mostly one of the myriad violent faults in capitalism rather than a way of describing who human beings can and can't be to each other, but the two are of course atrociously inseparable. That's the problem I showed up to try and dispel.) In a way, though, this is not really a question to do with the morality or otherwise of nudity or the invocation of erotic desire through the performance of nudity. It's a question about what it means to have the capacity, and/or the invitation, to quite fundamentally change a person's mind, to disturb their value system, to alter the habitual pattern of their life.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">And this, I think, ultimately, is where consent as a structure tends to be faulty. Consent is a language-performance that takes place in advance of an event that can only to a limited extent be accurately described or commissioned before it has taken place. The giving or withholding of consent is usually taken to be a rational exercise based on a weighing of secondary and perhaps circumstantial evidence: the one thing you can't base it on is the experience you haven't had yet. It's a predicament I think about a lot in relation to audiences. Whatever admonitory notices and disclaimers we may put up outside a show, whatever means we may use to describe our work through marketing copy and images and other supporting materials, the consent that is sought from audiences at the moment that they buy their ticket or they enter the auditorium is an incredibly crude technology. They cannot meaningfully consent to the experience they will have: they can only consent to be present through a period of not-knowing-yet. It's very like Jerome Bel's categorically distinct dismissal of the idea of refunding money to angry or dissatisfied or displeased or offended punters: the ticket price is literally the price of admission, and the transaction ultimately is not about the value of the show itself, but about the value (to you) of your presence in relation to it. This was on my mind very much when I toured with Tim Crouch's <em>The Author </em>a while back. No amount of pre-publicity or gossip or warning notices or careful reviews could create an adequate holding structure in which an audience could meaningfully give their informed consent to witnessing and participating in that play -- in <em>that </em>play: because the only information that would have amounted to such 'informed' consent was the information that the play divulged in performance.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">In my play <em>King Pelican </em>these anxieties about consent become unbearable. In creating a poem, an image, whatever, the central character -- the Victorian poet Edward Lear -- feels monstrous because those creations are invasive. The picture, the scribbly cartoon accompanying this or that limerick, is not, essentially, drawn in the book, on the page; it's drawn on the inside of the mind of the beholder. These thoughts, these ideas, these pictures, are forcibly introduced into the reader's imagination. This is not a line of argument that I thought up in relation to Lear: it was the furious reaction of one prominent early reader of Lear's work, who was resentful of the vividness of Lear's artistic interventions. What is seen can't be unseen. In the same podcast that Nick Blackburn talks about Cam4, Rachel Mars and I have (what I think is) a really interesting conversation about her brilliant show <em><a href="http://www.rachelmars.org/the-way-you-tell-them.html" target="_blank">The Way You Tell Them</a></em>, in which -- for extremely legitimate and artistically cogent reasons -- she does a kind of obscene aural graffiti all over a scene in a documentary film that is, or was, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCxqJgpejbs" target="_blank">one of my favourite documentaries</a>, a piece of work that I have revered and found extremely moving -- as, I think, has she. But I'll never again watch that film without it being to some extent undermined by that obscene overlay. I can't unhear her intervention, and in consenting to see her show, I certainly didn't consent to have that important artwork in my life vandalised in that way.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Except -- as I started to think (and perhaps say: I can't quite remember) by the end of that podcast recording -- what Rachel does in that show is, like much graffiti and like so very much that is taken to be obscene, a deeply moral act. It is not, for a second, thoughtless or careless. It does not, or it need not, ruin that film for me. It becomes, for a few minutes, a complicating layer, one that extends and reorients the active purview of a film that might, in fact, even be enhanced by Rachel's intervention. What I have to do is adapt to the additional information.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I've talked -- <a href="https://soundcloud.com/gettingbetteracquainted/gba-live-5-chris-goode-and" target="_blank">you can hear it here</a> -- with Karl James, the co-director of Tim Crouch's <em>The Author</em>, about the problem of consent. For Karl, the bottom line is -- if not simple, then fundamental. We must be able to risk harm. Without the risk of harm there is no movement. I wrestled with this a lot at the point that he said it; I feel reconciled to it now, but still deeply uncomfortable. Perhaps the way I explain it more reassuringly to myself is by rearranging the equation in this way: I feel harmed, or I have felt harmed, most in my life, by situations where there is no movement. So I guess what I take from that, and from all this, is that we need some more effective ethical construct for our consideration of the risky movement of changing minds (and, by extension, lives) than that of negotiating consent. This is, I must immediately stress, by no means an argument about wanting consent as an explicit language-act in relation to sex and other intimacies in proximity to harm to become a greyer area: quite the opposite. At the same time, we need to acknowledge, in thinking through these issues, the limits that we currently place on the effective registration of consent: for example, readers old enough to remember Operation Spanner in the mid-1980s, or those of any age whose own interests have brought them into contact somehow with the premises of that operation, will remember that it is (still) not possible legally to consent to being harmed (in line with the relevant definitions of actual bodily harm) in the pursuit of homosexual sadomasochistic activity. (The law still seems not to treat heterosexual S&amp;M the same way, though there appears to be a lot of confusion here.) That I can't consent to be beaten up by my lover, but he may be able to inflict emotional distress on me (by leaving me, for example, when I don't want him to) that may cause far more enduring harm and have a significantly more deleterious effect on my quality of life and <i>consent as a question won't even show up</i> in that space, seems to me to suggest there is a kind of inadequacy here to the way we frame consent and harm, and how those frames do not necessarily fall into alignment in the territories of art, morality and the law.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">One measure of that, I suppose, is that I honestly don't know how far we've strayed from Nick Haymes's brilliant and disturbing book <em>Gabe.</em> Are we still talking about it? I guess we're talking about the way in which I, like Tom Moore, don't seem to know how to think about what our responsibilities to Gabe Nevins may be, and that's partly because Gabe Nevins is totally fucked but also totally fine, and because we who respond to his appearance in these photographs with feelings of tenderness, or revulsion, or concern, or arousal, are totally fine but also totally fucked, not least by all the intermeshing technologies of mediation and commodification that allow me to look at intimate pictures of people I'll never meet. Perhaps we look at this picture and smile, and look at the next one and wince; perhaps we look at this picture one day and smile, and the next day we look at the same picture and wince; perhaps my friend and I look through this book together and he winces and I smile, or vice versa. These micro-negotiations are present in any act of reading worth the effort; they're (presumably) where the ethics of reading, in an artistic sense, are seeded. Which is partly to say, <em>Gabe </em>feels like not only an important book but a profoundly morally engaged one, precisely because of the buttons it pushes, the awkward questions it gives rise to around complicity and responsibility and the moment when something difficult and disquieting can also be engrossing and arousing.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I'm looking at Nick Haymes looking at Gabe Nevins lying naked in the bath, and I'm looking at Gabe Nevins looking back, through Nick Haymes to me, and I'm thinking, as usual, about audiences.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">* * *</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">As I sit down to write this next section, the great Phelim McDermott tweets a quote from the also-great Maurice Sendak: <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/oct/02/maurice-sendak-interview" target="_blank">"I refuse to lie to children."</a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">It's the kind of statement that feels familiar from the process of making <em><a href="http://chrisgoodeandcompany.co.uk/shows/monkey-bars/" target="_blank">Monkey Bars</a></em>, when it was often very hard to tell the difference between what was a radical insight and what was merely a sentimental gesture. (Like most people whose views would place them at an 'extreme' end of the normative political axis, I'm a deeply and incorrigibly sentimental person, who not only cries at the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81wOHP8zxgU" target="_blank">Peter Gabriel song from <i>Babe: Pig in the City</i></a>, but is actually crudely proud of that fact.) Which is it this time? I'm not sure. Those two categories, the radical and the sentimental, are not always easy to distinguish at all when we talk about children, and especially when -- as Sendak does here -- we're not actually talking about children at all, but using children as a point of reference for talking (approvingly) about ourselves. (I don't mean that <i>entirely</i>&nbsp;snarkily and it shouldn't be taken as denigratory of Sendak as an exceptionally eloquent artist in his dealings with children's wants and needs.)</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">One of the reasons we (culturally) treat children so badly is that doing so helps us keep them from developing detailed and complex relationships with other people in the context of our own shared imaginary. By seeking to suppress (or, much the same, to ignore) what about them is at odds with, or at an oblique angle relative to, the smoothest operations of our social mechanisms, we make them much more available as receivers, not only of our authoritarian and pedagogical cravings, but of our emotional projections: they become the wandering wireless prostheses that absorb and caddie our adult shame and doubt and fear. All the time, we are running these washed-out home movies in our heads about the creatures they are and the creatures we once were, and children -- not necessarily <i>our </i>children, but other people's children, the children that don't immediately belong to someone else when we think about them -- are set to work as screens.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">For that reason it makes perfect sense that when we first encounter the children in <a href="http://www.borischarmatz.org/en" target="_blank">Boris Charmatz</a>'s <i><a href="http://www.sadlerswells.com/whats-on/2014/Boris-Charmatz/" target="_blank">enfant</a> </i>-- which, let's say this now, is one of the half-dozen best pieces of theatre I've ever seen -- they are asleep, or of course they are acting being-asleep. Adult dancers move the 'sleeping' children's bodies in a range of ways nearly all of which seem strangely <i>in loco parentis</i>: there is tenderness (or there are the shapes of tenderness); there is game-playing, flying and whirling, a trackless rollercoaster for each of these kids to swoop through, the teasing quality of falling and looping and abrupt arrest; there is what reads as pride, exaltation. Perhaps that last feeling, especially, because we are not used to seeing children manipulated in this way by people other than their parents or their close relatives. Only blood ties, in the way we live now, here, normally permit this sort of access to a child's body; perhaps, occasionally, you might see these games in a professional therapeutic context. I have never seen anything like it on stage and it is electrically shocking whilst at the same time being the most unshocking of partnerships: a relation of self-evidence is what I think I'm watching. As in, when you see a show and you think, and feel: well, but, <i>of course</i>.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">That knife-edge between the radical and the sentimental obviously has to do with the notion of authenticity, which makes theatre thinkers' and critical theorists' heads explode. (No, but really: whisper that word to someone who's paid a living wage to think about performance, in any context, and you'll find you're suddenly in the almighty midst of an early Cronenberg film.) The lay-person's (or non-exploder's) sense of authenticity is often about the idea that whatever is underneath is more real than whatever covers it: that there is a striptease of dissembling to be imagined, at the bottom of which is the substance of honest unmediated realness: and everyone wants to get at that core, to have the password. Who is the child underneath? Some <a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-zcOVNPqRcMI/TcshamhfGiI/AAAAAAAAA9o/6C-9XXlpn1U/s1600/Pears+Soap.jpg" target="_blank">Pears' soap</a> paragon of innocence? Or a feral child waiting to pounce and rip the head off a blackbird? Is it <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inee2wKsXsk" target="_blank">Terry Scott's brother</a> under there? Some prototypical <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F04U5EZx5pw" target="_blank">Jack from <i>Lord of the Flies</i></a>? As a kid myself I watched a television documentary about <a href="http://www.summerhillschool.co.uk/history.php" target="_blank">Summerhill</a>, the radical Suffolk boarding school, and had a powerfully intense erotic reaction to a sequence showing the pupils swimming naked together; twenty years later it was dismal to read <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._S._Neill" target="_blank">A.S. Neill</a>'s account of Summerhill and to come across his insistence that there was essentially no homosexual behaviour at the school because homosexuality was a sign of something having gone wrong in the emotional life of the individual, and in the emotional lives of children raised the Summerhill way, nothing could or would go so badly wrong as that.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">But "sometimes when the wrappings fall / There's nothing underneath at all", Sondheim reminds us (in the song "Ah! But Underneath", that he introduced into <i>Follies</i>&nbsp;-- tellingly -- for its first British production), and that notion of peeling away the layers in order to get at the true instinctive energies of the child is, again, the reverse of what it appears to be: it springs from the will to name and stabilise the undefined person in the ideological image of -- or, quite often, the vampiric salvation of -- the adult who is doing the peeling: the guilt-ridden shall have their innocents, the sheep shall have their wolves.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I didn't realise I thought this until I did <a href="http://www.theatrebristolwriters.net/Interview-Chris-Goode-writer-of-Infinite-Lives" target="_blank">an interview in support of <i>Inifinite Lives</i></a>&nbsp;last week and it occurred to me how much capitalism has supplanted (or, at least, overwritten) the idea of original sin. Children now are born into a parlous despondency, a dire entanglement of complicity and planetary doom. (Hello! Try the waffles.) Innocence has nothing to do with what you choose or don't choose: it doesn't matter how many 'Not In My Name' badges I wear -- the circumstances under which the coat to which I pin them was manufactured are contrived quite precisely in my name and in the name of whoever is baptised tomorrow in my country. (Cue pic of <a href="http://s1.ibtimes.com/sites/www.ibtimes.com/files/styles/v2_article_large/public/2013/11/05/ifqxqmk.jpg" target="_blank">poor Brazilian factory workers making Guy Fawkes masks</a> for Anonymous western vanities to frig themselves silly with.) The stories that we tell about the innocence or otherwise of little children are stories about us, not them.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">So we look back at the Sadler's Wells stage on which we see a complex picture -- that is, an actually social picture -- that in some quarters, perhaps most quarters now, would seem nightmarish: a picture of adults touching children to whom they have no blood tie, touching them carefully but unstintingly, without reservation, without anxiety, coming near sometimes to the boundaries of what would seem physically 'safe'; more vertiginously still, a picture of children letting themselves be touched. The thought rushes in: on whose authority do they -- the apparently willing children -- do this? But let me straight away put this question more carefully. We can imagine the framework of consent that formally permits this project to take place on a major stage in London or Avignon, the provisions and contracts and systems that have to be in place, the statutory obligations and formal assurances and informal promises: all of which, presumably, is designed to support a process in the middle of which, these young children's parents or guardians say: OK, fine, let's do it. And I'm sure in almost every case, though perhaps to different degrees, the children are involved in those conversations. Everyone is very careful to make sure they aren't asked to do anything they don't want to do.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">But where and how do the desires of these children register, when we so systematically exclude them from the adult-patrolled matrices of consent? I should say right away without further ado that the sensualities and intimacies of <i>enfant </i>seem never to read as sexual -- though presumably, as with any performance, other viewers may produce other readings, especially when such a turbulent pressure of anxiety surrounds the imagery; towards the end, when many of the adult dancers are half-naked and some of the children have started tearing off their own clothes, it is not hard to feel the pulse of the room racing a little. I feel like I saw there a picture of (things like) 'joy' and 'liberation': but I also wondered what it would be like to be sitting in that auditorium next to someone like <a href="http://hermetic.com/bey/" target="_blank">Hakim Bey</a>, the brilliantly provocative anarchist philosopher whose work on 'temporary autonomous zones' (building on research around 'pirate Utopias') has hugely informed my own anarchism and my ideas of (things like) 'joy' and 'liberation', and part of whose anarchism has saliently, and of course controversially, been expressed in his unrelenting advocacy of legally unrestrained sexual contact between adults and children. It was not a stretch to imagine him profoundly identifying with the space of encounter and play towards which <i>enfant </i>grows. I couldn't decide whether, if <i>enfant </i>were an event occurring spontaneously in the park down the road from my house, some concerned pillar of the community wouldn't call the police.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">At least part of Bey's (admittedly self-justifying, but aren't we all?) position on the question of children, sex and consent is focused on what is -- by any measure -- the obviously hypocritical basis of the prohibition: parents and teachers routinely tell children that they should under no circumstances allow a grown-up to tell them what to do with their body, and of course in doing so they assume their own exemption from the warning. Perhaps my hatred for this position depends on my not being a parent myself (so I couldn't possibly understand, etc. -- the absolute privilege of blood ties, again); perhaps it has something to do with my queerness; if so, I think what underscores and motivates that position of queerness is the feeling of sexual dissidence I've always had, since I was a child the age of some of the older kids in <i>enfant</i>, simply because I was, at that age, more sexually active, and more intensely and hungrily sexually exploratory, than at almost any point in my adult life; but being discovered by adults a time or two <i>in flagrante</i>, and being punished or made to feel ashamed or given the silent treatment, and not having anyone I could talk to about what I felt and what I wanted and what might or might not have been safe or appropriate or OK about those feelings and the behaviours that arose out of them, became hugely and in some ways disastrously formative for me as I became some fucking sort of fucking adult, whatever the fuck I am. I feel sorry now for the kid I was at that age, because I was incredibly full of a radiantly honest desire that could not be acknowledged by anyone, hardly even myself; that could not register within a language-structure or a performative terrain of 'consent' because there was a blanket abnegation where that conversation might have lived.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">So when I watch the little girl who strips off her t-shirt and her shoes near the end of <i>enfant </i>and rampages around in her shorts, the complicatedness of that action is very resonant. What are the parameters of that action, how authored is it, how predictable is it, how was it arrived at?, etc. Again this is not to cast any kind of opprobrium on <i>enfant </i>but rather to celebrate its complexity and to attach to that complexity some act of witnessing, some way of saying that I instinctively trust my not-knowing, my adult doubt and anxiety. <i>enfant </i>testifies very beautifully on my behalf as the nine-year-old I was: it takes the complexity of my infantile desire and the social problem it represented (and still represents, far more now than it would have done in the early 1980s) and translates it into the generative problems within the impeccably elegant, formally meticulous structure of Boris Charmatz's piece. It too seems to reject the technology of consent as too crude; it requires a genuinely ethical engagement that is alive with the turbulence of contingency and the specific needs and desires of two dozen people on stage, half of whom need a special kind of carefulness around them because they are children, and the other half of whom need a different kind of carefulness -- perhaps not <i>very </i>different --&nbsp;because, poor fuckers, they are adults.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">It matters very much that as <i>enfant </i>proceeds, the tables turn, not just once but many times. For a while the children have the upper hand, it is they who control and manipulate while the adults are passive sleepyheads. Towards the end, as a lone piper traverses the stage, the adults and children follow him together, partners in Hamelin-like thrall. More and more, the stage looks simply like a place where these kids and grown-ups can live together, comfortable in their skin, and my overriding response is a kind of enviousness.&nbsp;</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/mciAiGJyzKM?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0' /></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Boris Charmatz / Musee de la danse, <i>enfant </i>(2011)</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I keep thinking back -- during the performance, I mean, but also since then -- to working on <i>Albemarle </i>in Leeds last November. On day one with the dancers, the astonishing <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwvbR60OGLk" target="_blank">Akeim Buck</a> led us all through an exercise which felt as close as I've ever come to hypnotic regression: it created a space in which to re-enter the radiant intensities and physical impulses of childhood. My body's never been so utterly ready for anything in my whole adult life -- not since, at the age of nine or ten, it was drummed in to me through every conceivable channel that what my body wanted was almost certainly wrong, and perverse, and would make my mother cry. At the age of forty, and not far off clinically obese, and anyway as someone who can count on the thumbs of a pair of oven-gloves the number of times I've danced in public, on this morning I ran and jumped and skipped around that rehearsal room with a hunger that amazed me as soon as the exercise was over. I hooted and screamed and laughed with all my breath. I lay down on the floor and could almost feel the grass tickling my nose, the ladybirds on my fingers, the smell of dirt and dew. I pulled off my socks as urgently as if they had been designed specifically to torture me. Only a few days before, working on the same project in London, I'd written a long account aiming to piece together how I came to feel, as an adult, that I didn't like, or trust, or want, my body. I wrote everything down I could remember, and arranged it chronologically. All the things that happened before I was eighteen. All the stuff about school and sport and masculinity and rough-and-tumble; all the stuff about food, about how at home we communicated with each other through food (sugar, especially), as a way of not having to ever say 'I love you' to anyone; all the stuff about sex and nudity and desire and guilt and the deep shock of queer shame that I felt might destroy my home and my security with one wrong move. Most of all of that before I was even at secondary school. By then it was just playing out the logics that were already crammed into my bewildered mind.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">And so <i>enfant </i>sings to me as a show about co-operative anarchy versus capitalist subjugation and injustice; a show suffused with and powered by erotic sensuality, that accepts that children experience those feelings too, but respects perfectly that they experience those feelings as children and in a way that isn't <i>about </i>who we are, virtuously or otherwise, as adults, and that isn't <i>for </i>us even if it's near us, and that if we see it for what it is we could even choose not to be afraid of it any more; and above all, a show that does exactly what I now want theatre to do -- and, I suspect, now want theatre to do precisely because of who I was when I was nine and how the fucking wretched damage done to that nine-year-old kid still re-explodes inside me <i>every fucking day</i>, one way or another -- in opening up a constructed space in which we can imagine other ways to live together, <i>and </i>make a start on doing exactly that living, in the knowledge that that theatrical space is no more or less constructed than the lethally violent and self-denying space of capitalism and patriarchy that we re-inflict on ourselves with almost our every action.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Weirdly (when you see it), <i>enfant </i>starts not with children at all but with the floppily passive (or, as per <a href="http://tmoliff.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/gallipoli-adj.html" target="_blank"><i>The Meaning of Liff</i>:&nbsp;'Gallipoli'</a>)&nbsp;bodies of 'sleeping' adults being moved around by a big machine, a giant mechanical robot arm that dances its not-quite-stupid motions a bit like the cranes over the east London skyline in Charles Atlas's <i>Hail the New Puritan</i>. As a thick industrial rope-like thread is unpicked by the machine, adult dancers are hauled onto the stage, lifted, moved about, caused nearly to collide. Their dignity is nowhere, and they are beautiful and absurd. Looking back: is this: children are to adults as adults are to machines? Neither in control nor out of control, but yielding to a tyranny that promises love in return for acquiescence? It is not without its appeal, God knows,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IR_m4YtewQM" target="_blank">when we're dry and nothing makes sense</a>. But those final rampages, at the other end of the show, those chaotic groups of adults and children, dancing and playing and swooping and forging a liveable togetherness out of their liking for each other's irrepressible energy and uncoverable skin: that movement feels like sweet and hard-won victory: totally radical <i>and</i> brutally sentimental, and not, for precisely fuck's sake, to be fucked with.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Yeah so I'm watching <i>enfant </i>and I'm thinking about the liveability, or otherwise, of my life.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">* * *</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">There's a poem I wrote years and years ago which has a line in it that even I don't quite understand, though it rotates in my head sometimes like a 3D screensaver. It says: "What we let go is how we know we're here."</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">On my last day in Bristol I trudge up Park Street (where George's Booksellers and Rayners Records used to be) and along Queen's Road (where, as a young lad, I'd be taken to Maggs' Department Store for an end-of-term chocolate milkshake to celebrate doing well in my exams) to the <a href="http://www.rwa.org.uk/" target="_blank">RWA</a> (where I first saw "modern art" with my own eyes: a Sidney Nolan retrospective that, even though I didn't like the work very much, somehow snagged in my mind and made me aware of how some art might have a very peculiar angle of incidence, just as some children do).</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I was interested to take a look at a group show called <a href="http://www.rwa.org.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/2014/02/oneself-as-another/" target="_blank">'Oneself as Another'</a>, which centred itself promisingly on an idea of alternative portraiture, an eagerness to present and examine what might normally be thought of as 'imperfection' as it relates to the paradigms by which we tend to judge ourselves and others, even if we do so in what we might hope was an informed and enlightened way. It turned out to be a slightly underpowered show in relation to its thesis but there was much to enjoy and admire. I liked <a href="http://www.johanandersson.com/" target="_blank">Johan Andersson</a>'s large-scale oil portraits of people with facial disfigurements, and their peppy dialogue with <a href="http://www.wandabernardino.com/" target="_blank">Wanda Bernardino</a>'s smaller oil studies in which she recreates figures from historic paintings and then obliterates their faces altogether, and with Tom Butler's 'Cabinet of Curiosity' series, in which he directly intervenes to modify the images on vintage portrait photographs and postcards, conjuring new weird identities for these figures through the imposition of masks or distortions or out-of-joint hairdos -- a pastime that brought to mind some of the quiet sci-fi-like mutations wrought by John Stezaker in his brilliant collage works.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-EcFHceyVs9k/Uw0lRu0kuWI/AAAAAAAAD5k/JH32MNkPTL4/s1600/Strangers_to_Ourselves20.5x18cmWEB.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-EcFHceyVs9k/Uw0lRu0kuWI/AAAAAAAAD5k/JH32MNkPTL4/s1600/Strangers_to_Ourselves20.5x18cmWEB.jpg" height="400" width="355" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Wanda Bernardino, 'Strangers to Ourselves [Study]' (2011)<br />oil on paper, 20.5x18cm</td></tr></tbody></table><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The show, though, is dominated by a photo-installation by <a href="http://www.ionerucquoi.com/" target="_blank">Ione Rucquoi</a>, called 'Sanctae - A Portrait of Secular Saints'. The work comprises twenty-one c-type prints, arranged in a semicircle around the viewer, each depicting a naked woman rendered as a haloed saint. Each of these bodies is distinct -- I mean unique, of course, anyway, but also marked somehow. There are scars and bandages, masks and fascinators, signs and fetishes. The marks tell silent but eloquent stories of motherhood, transition, injury, loss; some are immediately comprehensible, even shockingly so, while others seem to carry a symbolic freight that might be private to the subject and the artist, or to refer to quite particular cultural narratives that I, as a gay white European male, haven't (taken the trouble to) come across before.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="281" mozallowfullscreen="" src="//player.vimeo.com/video/54319515" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="500"></iframe> </div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://vimeo.com/54319515">Sanctae</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/user14675681">Joanna Ensum</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com/">Vimeo</a>.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Two things, two fronts, for me, collide, interestingly and confusingly. One is that, after many years of insisting on materialities and nothing (or little) but, I have in the past few months started feeling differently about ways in which we set some space apart, we circumscribe it and call it 'sacred', for instance, or we frame certain constructed behaviours as 'ritual'. I've never had any use for these modes, really, until now. I'm still not sure I have much use for them. But I can tell that they're speaking to me. There's something about stepping out of oneself in order to be more present, more productive: it's exactly <i>not </i>about transcendence, which has always been (and still is) the manoeuvre I'm particularly anxious about: it's about being in a more elaborately complicated <i>here </i>in order to get something specific done that needs us first to adjust our gaze. It is not -- despite some of what I've just written -- a realm of woolly thinking and mumbo-jumbo. It's as simple as: when we did our week on <i>The Witch of Edmonton</i>&nbsp;at the NT Studio last summer I cut my hair and painted my nails because I felt that I needed a slightly different 'me' to show up to work, in order to be able to hold open a slightly different 'here' for everyone to inhabit. (Boy oh fuckity boy did that ever work.) Which in turn is not very different from: when I toured in <i>The Author</i>, the idea was that we'd rock up for the show in whatever clothes we happened to be wearing that day, and perform just like that; but I always felt I needed to change my shoes -- partly because I think I think differently depending on what shoes I'm wearing (and yes you may henceforth call me Dame Judi), but partly because that tiny chink of a liminal transition made a palpable difference to how I interpreted my own vulnerability on the inside of that play's devastating system. And now I think perhaps changing from a pair of Vans to a pair of Converse ten minutes before the house opens is not all that different, at least categorically, from drawing a pentagram on the floor in chalk and asking everyone to wear garments made out of still-warm deerskin.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The other thing that felt weighty in that space was my awarness of myself as a cisgendered man. No, I suppose it is not an unusual experience for a man to stand in a gallery space and be bounteously surrounded by images of naked (or nude) women. But this is a single work, authored by a female artist in collaboration with 21 female subjects, and seeking both to contemplate and to testify from a range of experiences that are first and foremost distinctively female, to do with female reproductivity, female ageing, the female body. I think Rucquoi's installation is very beautiful, and very candid, in a way that is at once painful and pain-relieving. But I find in its midst I have a difficult critical question for myself that has to do with stance. Where do I stand in relation to these images? It is an unusual experience for a man, perhaps, to confront art that is not at least implicitly <i>for </i>you and <i>about </i>you. This work is accessible to me, it doesn't turn away from me, it has nothing to hide from me, but it respectfully presents a complex set of truths with which, in the moment of viewing, I don't feel I already have an adequate or articulate sense of relation. This is a state I associate with worthwhile art. But I don't often feel so personally, corporeally present, and so gendered in my presence, when I bring myself to art of that kind. I wonder -- only because I could use the control version in my head -- what it would be like to stand before a semicircle of 21 images of self-identifying queer or gay men, placing before me their testimony about some ideas that maybe I would more intimately recognize and share, about queer bodies and queer autobiographies, that particular vocabulary of scars and inscriptions. At the very outset of even posing myself the question, I crumple. I feel myself collapse inside, too sad, too grateful. I can't tell if this is the beginning, or the end, of empathy.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">A few days later, Jonny writes (beautifully) to say, among other things, that he increasingly feels that all we can do in art is to speak as accurately as we can to our own experience, and not to seek to speak or make claims on behalf of others, or of some specious 'us' or 'we'. I know what he means; and I know his point of departure is one of wishing to minimize harm, and I guess where I am with that right now is that I trust it when I say it and I don't really trust it when anyone else says it -- which maybe goes some way to proving its validity or at least its viability as a position. But I know that sometimes -- often -- and not only in theatre -- I experience an 'us' -- or many different constructions of 'us' -- very keenly and dearly and compellingly: and if I can't speak with the voice of that 'us', I <i>can</i> point to the ways in which that 'us' is a necessary, a crucial, part of my individual freedom: a liberty that means nothing until it is partly given away. Until it becomes a gift held out towards others, for them to take.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Meanwhile in a space somehow (for me at least) conceptually adjacent to this, the Daily Mail has grabbed some coverage and some larded indignation by reprinting as 'new' (they're nothing of the sort) certain claims about how Harriet Harman and other senior (or once-senior) Labour figures may, during their involvement with the National Council for Civil Liberties (the pressure group now known as Liberty) in the mid/late 1970s, have engaged in advocacy on behalf of or in proximity to a now notorious (&amp; defunct) grassroots organization called the Paedophile Information Exchange. Ed Miliband and <a href="http://www.harrietharman.org/nccl-statement---24022014" target="_blank">Harman herself</a> have today both issued denunciations and rebuttals of the story -- as well they might, if it's untrue; Harman calls it a politically motivated smear campaign, which I suspect tends to underestimate the extent to which the Mail likes any sort of story that allows them 'legitimately' to use phrases like "sex with children" which, of course, remain irrepressibly popular internet search terms. It's taken several attempts in different forums over several years to really make the Harman/PIE story break big -- I certainly first read about it at least five years ago -- and I guess the much greater volume of noise around it now is some sort of index of how steeply attitudes have changed, not just in the last forty years, but in the last five or ten. Certainly during that 1970s period the Paedophile Information Exchange was by no means universally seen as being beyond the pale, for all that most people might want to distance themselves emphatically from its activities and its programme. As is often observed, defending the liberty and the freedom of speech of people we agree with is not difficult; it's those by whom we, and the normativities on which we suppose ourselves to depend, are most threatened and disturbed who most need support -- specialist, if not wide, support -- in preserving their right to pursue unpopular agendas. It's been obvious in relation to Savile and Operation Yewtree and other high-profile 'celebrity' sex abuse cases in recent months that cultural attitudes have greatly changed in my lifetime, and this can be acknowledged without in any way diminishing or obscuring the terrible distress and trauma experienced by victims of unwanted sexual contact who have lived in the shadow of those experiences for many decades since. There's absolutely no doubt in my mind that the Cleveland child abuse 'scandal' in 1987 was a tipping point: you could feel it at the time, a quite sudden hardening of attitudes towards the idea of some people wanting to have sex with children -- an idea that previously had excited, broadly, a mixture of pity and jocularity -- that paedophiles were sad and inadequate individuals in the grip of an unfortunate compulsion, but an essentially naughty rather than evil one, something more like a peccadillo than a psychopathology. (A residue of which of course can still be discerned in the commodity operations of what you might call 'barely legal' culture, and the buzz of titillation around the age of consent as a threshold, a tradition now rigorously upheld by the Daily Mail's web site, as Harman has splendidly pointed out.) The relative merits of these various perspectives on paedophilia are not my topic here (though it's interesting to note how all of them have been applied, at different times in the past seventy years, to adult homosexuality), but it's worth drawing attention to how relatively recently it's become the case that people who are erotically oriented towards children are the last sexual minority it's OK to hate out loud and to want to castrate / incarcerate / string up -- it's only since the early 90s that paedophilia as an <i>orientation</i> has been widely seen as an inherent and unmitigable evil, let alone The Worst Thing In The World; throughout most of our cultural history this is <i>not</i>&nbsp;what we've thought -- and even if this present phase finds us at an apogee of enlightenment (which seems unlikely, if the Daily Mail are cheerleading it), it seems probable that we're <i>not done talking about this</i>, just as we've not finished science or solved politics.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">It's easy to forget that, even in the midst of these orchestrated outbreaks of fortissimo hyperventilation, all over the world, people go to bed with each other and are glad of the company; they take off their clothes and feel somehow better without them; they trust and confide in each other, they touch each other with their bare hands, as part of a grateful negotiation, willingly and equitably and sometimes in a spirit of glad and defiant self-exposure. It sometimes seems that those stories, unfolding someplace off the grid of fearful and reductive commodity relations, love stories without proprietary trademarks and copyright notices, are among the least heard.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I talk more with my actor friend who was not too sure about getting naked on stage. He says he feels differently about it now. Having been in rehearsal with us now he's got a better understanding of the context in which it would happen; the care around it and beneath it as an actionable proposition. What he's responding to I suppose, and what Jonny maybe (and maybe for good reason) isn't in a position to see at the moment, is the ways in which the social art I, like many, hope to make creates space specifically in order to share it, or in order to give it away. It wants to introduce, in its temporary autonomous way, some kind of micro gift economy.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I haven't worked with the idea of gift nearly as much as certain other performance artists I know (&amp; love) -- <a href="http://www.rajnishah.com/performances/small-gifts" target="_blank">Rajni Shah</a>, for example, or <a href="http://www.timjeeves.com/giving_into_gift.html" target="_blank">Tim Jeeves</a>. But I do remember how I started to think about these questions. Normally I carry blank postcards around with me, on which to write bits of stimulus for actors -- single words to be combined with other words, or simple task instructions, or more poetic leaping-off points that require a degree of thoughtful interpretation or decoding. One evening in 1999 on my way to rehearsal I couldn't find blank postcards anywhere. I ended up buying some Christmas gift tags instead, in the foyer of the Royal Festival Hall. They were gold-coloured and they said 'peace' on them in lowercase. (I'm sure I wouldn't buy them now. The last thing we need right now is peace.) Writing lyrical prompts and instructions inside gift tags seemed to change everything about those fragments of text, and everything about the responses of the actors who received them. We worked by candlelight, just to create some atmosphere in that old church hall. Warm light, a warm room; warm bodies. Some people took off some of their clothes; I think I suggested that maybe but I don't think I asked for it and anyway I didn't think anyone would.&nbsp;</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I thought the exercise would be a twenty-minute warm-up; in the event it took up the first two hours of our three hour rehearsal. The gift tag prompts became an open invitation, by which I suppose I mean the actors used the cryptic stimulus as license to open up -- to each other, to the situation, to that particular temporary quality of light and heat -- not least <a href="http://beescope.blogspot.co.uk/2007/07/heat-of-affiliation-conversation-with.html" target="_blank">what Tim Miller calls "the heat of affiliation"</a>. It was tender and thoughtful; erotic, perhaps, in a shimmering way, but as fundamentally safe as anywhere can ever be where change is happening. Somewhere in here, I thought, looking around -- as I so often think, working in theatre with the bravest and kindest of actors -- is how I want to live. Somewhere in here is the other place.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I'm looking around at that rehearsal room, and I'm thinking about you.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div>Chris Goodehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17993698000314709291noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28051672.post-6194913718797573062014-01-01T16:55:00.000+00:002014-01-01T17:05:33.896+00:00Rebootyliciousness<br />﻿<br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-OCt1k4vj2A0/UsGcQjDiyoI/AAAAAAAAD3g/tkWXyWlaTfM/s1600/_MG_0276.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="266" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-OCt1k4vj2A0/UsGcQjDiyoI/AAAAAAAAD3g/tkWXyWlaTfM/s400/_MG_0276.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br />It's that man again: CG in February 2013<br />Photo: <a href="http://rwdavenport.co.uk/">Richard Davenport</a></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><br />Hey yo, it's true, o best beloved: as true as a sandboy, as true as <a href="http://www.unnecessaryquotes.com/" target="_blank">the "nose" on my "face"</a>: your long-lost pal Cap'n Beescope has returned! Yes dears, I'm back! Back! I'm back like Lazarus on a warmed-up bungee! I'm back like Vashti Bunyan astride a psilocybin boomerang! I'm <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/25/childhood-rickets-vitamin-d" target="_blank">back like childhood rickets</a> in a time of&nbsp;austerity prosecuted entirely for reasons of ideological fixation and psychosexual derangement! Back like the proverbial bad penny -- or, adjusting for inflation according to the Consumer Price Index -- a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yH8yuld4DUE" target="_blank">MALIGN TUPPENCE</a>. Thank you for your ecstasy, I'm very touched; I ask only that before you rush to celebratory action in honour of the Prodigal Thompson, you take account of my vegetarianism, now entering its 17th arse-boring year: perhaps rather than killing the fatted calf, you might instead try, say, throttling the <a href="http://www.universalistchurch.net/boyinthebands/wp-images/roast-unturkey.png" target="_blank">engorged Quorn</a>? -- And there we have it: the end of the first paragraph and already we've arrived at a far-fetched euphemism for masturbation. Did you miss me? Course you did. <i>Course you did.</i><br /><br />And my, how you've grown! It suits you. It really does. I love what you've done with your hair. In fact you're even lovelier than I remember you. Maybe absence really does make the heart grow fonder. When I think of how utterly nauseated I was by you little more than two years ago, how my heart sank every time I thought of having to write another 30,000 word post just to feed your beastly insatiable appetite, while you&nbsp;lounged around spilling out of your threadbare British Home Stores 'Tigerlily' kimono, cramming your mucky snackhole with BBQ Mini Cheddars and toggling neurotically between Thompson's, Reddit and ChubStarz.com -- well, let's just say I needed a little me-time. A little time to think things over. A full colonic irrigation of the etiolated soul, if you will.<br /><br />But now I'm back! From outer space! You just walked in to find me here with that sad look upon my face! (Actually I'm not as sad as I look. It's just how my face settles in repose. You know, like <a href="http://static.giantbomb.com/uploads/original/2/28940/1115418-the.jpg" target="_blank">Ringo Starr</a>.) And, in all seriousness, it's <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T05F0MFGuF4" target="_blank">nice to be with you again. Isn't it, Ronnie? "Yes it is."</a> Slightly weird, to be honest. I'm sure this must be what it's like for Natalie Cassidy every time she returns to <i>EastEnders</i>. I mean I think I'm back here for keeps, or at least for long enough to take off my parka, but I don't think I'll know until I've done a half dozen posts and I feel like I'm back in the rhythm.<br /><br />Good though to be re-entering the fray at a time when the theatre blogosphere feels quietly buzzy again, after a couple of years of unmistakeable doldrums. By 2011 it all seemed a bit depleted: a dwindling faux-community of tired commentators all jogging round the same block nattering to themselves about cramp while the real conversations seemed to be happening elsewhere. It doesn't feel that way at all right now, to me&nbsp;-- though that may be a trick of the light, I suppose: I might just be doing a better job of paying attention. But even so, the decisive impulse seems to be, simply, a deepening -- and/or broadening -- understanding that Twitter, in particular, won't satisfactorily contain many of the important conversations that need to be had in the sector: not just for nuance but for developed argument, it's necessary to migrate back to the longer-form, and perhaps the sense is stronger now that those conversations have to be had, that we have much to say to each other, much to learn and much to share; that we are not simply free-floating pixels in an atomised making-culture, whose principal mode of engagement is a cheerful, acquisitive networking behaviour of the sort that Twitter and Facebook foster so excellently: but that we need the means to express more powerfully and more ardently our sense of being with each other, of working not in secretive competition but in open concert and continuous dialogue. There's no doubt that <a href="http://exeuntmagazine.com/" target="_blank">Exeunt</a> has pretty consistently been a marvellous centre of gravity, for all that it sometimes makes me want to throw hazelnuts at the cat; Andrew Haydon seems re-energised and better-than-ever over at <a href="http://postcardsgods.blogspot.co.uk/" target="_blank">Postcards from the Gods</a> -- his output this past year has almost tripled that of 2011; Maddy Costa's <a href="http://statesofdeliquescence.blogspot.co.uk/" target="_blank">States of Deliquescence</a> is a consistently effulgent beacon of long-form critical practice, written with rare (and raw) intelligence, in the fullest sense of that word, and all the better for the extent to which Maddy has such a talent and a courage for taking work personally and processing it with a rigour that is as much romantic as intellectual; younger voices like <a href="http://catherinelove.co.uk/" target="_blank">Catherine Love</a>, <a href="http://synonymsforchurlish.tumblr.com/" target="_blank">Megan Vaughan</a>, <a href="http://dan-hutton.co.uk/" target="_blank">Dan Hutton</a> and <a href="http://exeuntmagazine.com/author/stewart-pringle/" target="_blank">Stewart Pringle</a> have sung out with great distinction; above all I feel heartened by the way that blog spaces have continued to be important -- and, again, perhaps, seem more than a little revitalised of late -- as sites for the thinkings-aloud of fellow makers such as <a href="http://www.hannahnicklin.com/?page_id=528" target="_blank">Hannah Nicklin</a>, <a href="http://stelladuffy.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">Stella Duffy</a>, <a href="http://hannahsilva.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">Hannah Silva</a>, <a href="http://www.danielbye.co.uk/blog.html" target="_blank">Dan Bye</a>, <a href="http://www.danrebellato.co.uk/spilled-ink/" target="_blank">Dan Rebellato</a>, <a href="http://alanlaneblog.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">Alan Lane</a>, <a href="http://andytfield.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">Andy Field</a>, <a href="http://thirdangeluk.blogspot.co.uk/" target="_blank">Third Angel</a>, <a href="http://www.swiftalex.co.uk/blog/" target="_blank">Alex Swift</a>, <a href="http://www.scottee.co.uk/#!blog/c1193" target="_blank">Scottee</a>, and, perhaps most inspiringly for me from day to day, <a href="http://diary.teatrodomundo.com/" target="_blank">Jo Clifford</a>. (Naturally, this invidious on-the-hoof register will certainly have overlooked very many excellent folks whose names I will eventually regret to have omitted.) Most recently, a very worthwhile conversation around how artists get paid for what they do was initiated by <a href="http://thebryonykimmings.tumblr.com/post/67660917680/you-show-me-yours" target="_blank">Bryony Kimmings on her blog</a>, and pursued across a whole network of other blogs, in a way that neither Twitter or Facebook on the one hand nor live formats such as the 'open space' of <a href="http://www.devotedanddisgruntled.com/" target="_blank">Devoted &amp; Disgruntled</a> could quite have matched: and perhaps that, above all, makes me feel like the time is right for a reboot.<br /><br />More locally, what I never quite said out loud -- on these pages, at least -- and thus a somewhat submerged reason for my having quit two years ago (though friends and Twitter followers will almost certainly know it), is that I needed a sabbatical in order to create space for a different writing project to happen: namely, a book, <i>The Forest and the Field</i>, for <a href="http://www.oberonbooks.com/" target="_blank">Oberon</a>. Not only did I need to free up the time and energy to be able to take on something new, I was also looking to release myself from the grip of a voice that had come to feel overfamiliar here at Thompson's: insufferably prolix, strenuously performative, slightly arch sometimes, a bit camp here and there... -- well, you, dears, of all people, know the score. I thought putting the blog to sleep for a while might help me find a different style to work with: more concise, more direct, more penetrating, more accessible I suppose because less convoluted, altogether less wearisome in its demands on the reader: a voice I've found occasionally, for example amid the self-imposed constraints of <a href="http://beescope.blogspot.co.uk/2010/05/house-of-future.html" target="_blank">'House of the Future'</a>, my piece for the ICA's 'Some of the Futures' event a few years ago, of which I remain sort of proud, not least because so little I've written looks anything like it.<br /><br />If I tell you that the manuscript I'll be delivering to Oberon in about a fortnight is almost exactly a year late and more than twice as long as it was supposed to be, you'll surmise, not incorrectly, that the economy I was seeking in the end eluded me. [Insert complicated non-Euclidean emoticon.]&nbsp;Tyring that brevity on for size&nbsp;felt, on the whole, unnatural -- certainly no less of a performance, and largely militating against fluency: not, I've come to realise, because I'm permanently doomed to keep reproducing a particular set of prosodic contortions, a kind of gurning textual rictus: but simply because I think my natural way of thinking about things is (a) hyperconnective, as it often is with cyclothymic people,&nbsp;and (b) musical: so whatever there is to say always seems to benefit from (a) being thought about in relation to four or nine&nbsp;other things, and (b) being layered over or run alongside those other things in as generously lubricated a way as possible. I do know how wearing this can be -- as anyone who, like me, has the unabridged audiobook of <i>The Fry Chronicles </i>on their iPod in case of insomnia, surely will -- but I'm at least a mite reassured to know it's less an affectation than an authentic and apparently inescapable signature.<br /><br />More about the book in due course, I'm sure; anyway, this is a suitably roundabout way of saying: here we are, straightaway back to business as usual, and I hope that's all right with you. Before terribly long, <a href="http://chrisgoodeandcompany.co.uk/" target="_blank">Chris Goode &amp; Company</a> hopes to update its web site (which, according to one esteemed commentator, at present makes us look like we do children's theatre), and I suspect the blog will be at the heart of that new site, in which case perhaps it will change to fit its new surroundings; I'd certainly love, above all, for it to offer a home (or a holiday cottage) to voices other than my own -- as long as our opinions are essentially identical, ha ha. But for now, I trust we can sweep my two-year <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hl-nqr6eJ9M" target="_blank">lost weekend</a> under the shagpile and pick up where we left off.<br /><br />Really, of course, I'd love to offer you a quick video montage of everything I've been up to in the past couple of years, like the sequence built around <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7POJjKRzTh8" target="_blank">Victor's European vacation</a> in <i>The Rules of Attraction</i> (probably the best thing about that rather dreary and baleful film, very much including James Van Der Beek doing <i>edgy</i>). But in the absence of such a breakneck highlights reel, I can't think of a way of making it palatable. What does, however, seem in order is a catch-up&nbsp;account of my 2013, in the spirit of year's-end retrogasmicity: which I shall follow with some thoughts about the theatre I've enjoyed and/or admired most in the past twelve months, and, by way of a nod to the Thompson's Furtive 50 of old, a list of the best records I came across this year. By which point you will be heartily sick of me all over again, and quietly counting down to the next intermission.<br /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">* * *</div><br /><br />It's funny to think that, from the outside, Chris Goode &amp; Company might well seem to have had rather a quiet year in 2013, following a first eighteen months of operation (starting mid-2011) in which we made five full shows (<i>Where We Meet</i>, <i>Keep Breathing</i>, <i>GOD/HEAD</i>, <i>9</i>, and <i>Monkey Bars</i>), ran <i>Open House</i> a couple of times, toured <i>The Adventures of Wound Man and Shirley</i>, and so on.<br /><br />This year, we just had one brand new show in circulation, and even that was to some extent a reworking of an earlier piece: the stage version of <i><a href="http://chrisgoodeandcompany.co.uk/shows/the-forest-the-field/" target="_blank">The Forest and the Field</a></i>, which as you might remember started life as an academic paper several years ago, and became a scratch of a performance work in 2009 for my <i><a href="http://beescope.blogspot.co.uk/2009/10/lean-upstream.html" target="_blank">LEAN UPSTREAM</a></i> season at Toynbee Studios and Camden People's Theatre; now, of course, it's about to be a full-length (to say the&nbsp;least!) book, which, had I delivered it on schedule, would have been on the merchandise stall as we toured the completely reworked theatre version this spring. Never mind: the performance version seemed to stand on its own feet. In truth I wasn't totally happy with what I ended up doing in the show -- it seemed a bit thickety in its verbals, even for a self-styled 'performance&nbsp;lecture':&nbsp;especially as I opted not to learn the text but to read it from a handheld script, which made it a slightly uphill slog towards a climax that never quite worked anyway. But there was lots to be pleased about: not least our decision, early in the process, not simply to remount the 2009 version and spend a bit more money on it, but to start over from nearly-scratch and rethink the structure and the content of the whole show from the bottom up. I was thrilled with the space we created, through the meeting of Naomi Dawson's design, Kristina Hjelm's lighting, and James Lewis's typically creative and enabling stage management -- I'm not sure I've ever offered an audience a more exciting and interesting room to walk into. Exciting too -- if inevitably headachey at times -- to work at last with a real cat in the space, a realization of something that's become kind of a talisman for my theatre thinking: a good corrective, in a way, to a too-easy conceptual figuration: in actuality, most of the cats (we had a different guest in each venue) were bored, recalcitrant and unhappy in varying degrees, and only our London cat, Antonio -- thoroughly accustomed to life in a noisy, arty Tottenham warehouse -- really performed his catness with the sort of stylish insouciance that I had imagined: so that's a good lesson, though not one (I think) that invalidates my interest in working with cats as co-performers.<br /><br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-n00fQzak5n0/UsF_qKvD6AI/AAAAAAAAD2U/snXcSyNXMq0/s1600/RWD13_Forest+&amp;+field_021.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="266" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-n00fQzak5n0/UsF_qKvD6AI/AAAAAAAAD2U/snXcSyNXMq0/s400/RWD13_Forest+&amp;+field_021.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br />Antonio the Cat, with sidekick Tom Ross-Williams<br />in <em>The Forest and the Field </em>(CG&amp;Co, Ovalhouse)<br />Photo: <a href="http://rwdavenport.co.uk/">Richard Davenport</a></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><br />For me, though, the best thing about <i>The Forest and the Field</i> was meeting and getting to know and to work with the splendid Tom Ross-Williams, who really brought the piece to life, acting multiple supporting roles, from Shakespeare's Miranda to O.J. Simpson, and providing a host of memorable moments as he moved, often naked, through this ever-shifting theatrical landscape. I don't imagine <i>The Forest and the Field </i>has a future life, though I'd have liked it to -- it's expensive to do, and laborious in terms of getting in and out, and ultimately, it's not the sort of show that a very large number of people want to see. But audiences everywhere we went were (more or less) appreciative, and, pleasingly, argumentative, often staying behind to carry on the conversation with Tom and me. And&nbsp;for my part, I fulfilled a longstanding ambition during the tour&nbsp;by playing the Arnolfini&nbsp;as part of Mayfest. Arnolfini was an incredibly formative venue in my early development as a proto-artist and budding homo during my teenage years in Bristol: it's where I first saw live art, where I first discovered <a href="http://www.goatislandperformance.org/" target="_blank">Goat Island</a>, and where -- in the still limitlessly engrossing bookshop -- I found out half of what I've ever really needed to know. So for a big fat sentimentalist like me, to tread those not-exactly-boards myself was quite something.<br /><br />The other big above-the-radar project for the year as far as CG&amp;Co goes was the autumn tour for <i><a href="http://chrisgoodeandcompany.co.uk/shows/monkey-bars/" target="_blank">Monkey Bars</a></i>. The R&amp;D week at the NT Studio for what eventually became <i>Monkey Bars </i>was one of the first things we ever did under the company name, in the early summer of 2011: so the story of that show threads more than any other through the story of the company so far. It's now easily my most-seen and best-reviewed show, and it's interesting to think of it speaking for the company, and by extension for me, in the way that it has. I suppose that's partly to say that I'm aware my work serves (or is exposed to the attention of) a lot of different constituencies -- the alternative-mainstream crowd, the live art audience, new writing people; queers and not, academics and not, fellow-travellers and not -- and I normally find myself sort of apologizing to at least some of those people about everything I make -- "this one isn't really for you" -- but I don't think I've ever done that with <i>Monkey Bars</i>: it seems to be able to meet almost everyone halfway. Some early critics in Edinburgh were absolutely tone-deaf to it -- memorably, <a href="http://www.britishtheatreguide.info/reviews/monkey-bars-traverse-2-7871" target="_blank">British Theatre Guide's Philip Fisher</a>, Human Capital partner at BDO and the distinguished author of <i>Employee Share Schemes </i>-- but that aside, it feels like a structure that turns appealingly to catch the light from a lot of different angles. (I promise I'd feel more abashed about saying so, except the basic concept of <i>Monkey Bars </i>came to me in what seemed a random flash of inspiration one evening as I walked hurriedly up the A4144, and of course -- as my dear <i>Monkey </i>pal Christian Roe is fond of saying -- we had the most extraordinary team of writers: so I hardly feel that its success is much of my doing, but only that I was the recipient of great good fortune. Genuinely. That's not just me being cute, for once.)<br /><br />Anyway, it was a real pleasure to revisit <i>Monkey Bars</i> with none of the intense stress and <br />immoderate dread that accompanied the run-up to its premiere at the Traverse in 2012; the company was largely intact -- another piece of marvellous luck -- and the loss of Jacquetta May from the acting ensemble was delightfully mitigated by the happiness of welcoming in her stead Cathy Tyson, star of <i>Mona Lisa </i>and <i>Band of Gold </i>and ex-headmistress of <i>Grange Hill.</i> Cathy was gorgeous to work with and the rest of the cast took enormously good care of her as she felt her way in to the piece; in fact the whole project felt suffused with a kindness and hospitality that was infectious and enveloping, in a way that I hope is characteristic of how we like to do things, but isn't always easy to confect. Of the 33 shows in the tour I only saw a very few -- the first, at the lovely Brewhouse in Kendal; the last, at Arts Depot in Finchley; and a couple in between -- but I liked very much the direction in which the show, on its best nights, stretched: as ever with almost anything, it worked best when it was at its lightest, not asking for laughs or advertising the available insights, but simply allowing an audience to meet us in their own time and at their own temperature. Again, <i>Monkey Bars </i>probably really has come to an end now, unless Vegas calls: but there's already been one amateur production -- at the Playroom in Cambridge, a terrific little student venue where I acted for a week in 1993 (Presley in <i>The Pitchfork Disney</i>) and directed my play <i>Weepie </i>in 1997 -- and there's about to be another: so maybe its work is not yet complete.<br /><br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-xiMbOLZJpkM/UsGBQMylgHI/AAAAAAAAD2g/8PGL4QWoRqk/s1600/Monkey+Bars+production+photo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="357" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-xiMbOLZJpkM/UsGBQMylgHI/AAAAAAAAD2g/8PGL4QWoRqk/s400/Monkey+Bars+production+photo.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br />Philip Bosworth, Christian Roe and Angela Clerkin in <em>Monkey Bars</em><br />Photo: Richard Davenport</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><br />I guess for my amazing producer, the lovely Ric Watts, lumbered with the whole panoply of logistical nightmares,&nbsp;<i>Monkey Bars </i>has dominated CG&amp;Co's year. For me, though, another project -- one that's so far only shyly peeped above the parapet as far as audiences are concerned -- has been the backbone of our 2013: that's <i>Albemarle</i>, a major show that we're developing for 2014/15. The scale and the ambitiousness of <i>Albemarle</i> have meant that we're having to build it slowly, block by block -- in a complete reverse of my normal working patterns. Generally, once I have an idea for a show, I like to turn it around quickly: there often aren't scratches or work-in-progress showings, there's maybe a week of private&nbsp;R&amp;D at some point to just pilot a few basic ideas but on the whole I'd rather get a new piece made in an intense block of four or five weeks and then show it to audiences in a form I don't mind calling 'finished'. (Of course they never are 'finished', really&nbsp;-- or, when they are, they're fucked.) But that's not how it's going to work with <i>Albemarle</i>, and I must say I'm enjoying very much this slower, more dispersed process, and I think the piece will be rather the better for it.<br /><br />Essentially, <i>Albemarle </i>is a dance piece layered over a theatre piece, or vice versa: and as it stands, the dance elements are being developed in Leeds, where the three core dancers, Akeim Buck, Pauline Mayers and Toke Strandby, are based: while the theatre show in which that dance will be embedded is, for the moment, being made in London, with three performers, Jo Clifford, Jeni Draper and Tom Ross-Williams. I'll perform in it too, and hopefully continue to co-direct with the brilliant Jamie Wood, and there are a couple of other performers, Jonny Liron and Heather Uprichard, who have been with us on the journey so far and perhaps will continue to be so. So it's a lovely room, wherever it finds itself, populated by truly talented, generous, warm, beautiful, courageous people.<br /><br />The <i>Albemarle </i>year began for me with a week on my own at the NT Studio, trying to map some early thoughts; then in the spring we had a week at Theatre in the Mill in Bradford, starting to think about the dance element, and creating some space in which we could explore what it might mean for highly skilled dancers and complete non-dancers to try to work together in a single frame. Then in the summer CG&amp;Co were invited to undertake a<a href="http://www.bikeshedtheatre.co.uk/chrisgoode/" target="_blank"> three-week residency</a> at the brilliant (and officially 'Most Welcoming') Bike Shed Theatre in Exeter, where we did a lot of talking and curated/presented a busy programme of events in varying kinds of proximity to the concerns of <i>Albemarle</i> -- including, among many other happy and productive occurrences, the great joy of a rare week working with my longtime collaborator <a href="http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/english/people/staff/academic/schmidt/index.aspx" target="_blank">Theron Schmidt</a>; a full-on&nbsp;few days hanging out with the amazing&nbsp;Jo Clifford and experiencing her extraordinary <i>The Gospel According To Jesus, Queen of Heaven</i>; and the pleasure and stimulation of a public reading and conversation shared with the poet and critic <a href="http://www.johnhallpoet.org.uk/" target="_blank">John Hall</a>. I pulled a few things out of the back catalogue -- <i>Infinite Lives</i>, <i>Hippo World Guest Book</i>, and (because somebody foolishly dropped a hat) Schwitters's <i>Ursonate</i>, among others; I also got to perform <a href="http://www.asmithontheinternet.com/" target="_blank">a[ndy] smith</a>'s <em>Commonwealth </em>(which Tim Crouch later did, superbly,&nbsp;as a one-off for <a href="http://www.royalcourttheatre.com/season/open-court-festival" target="_blank">Open Court</a>) and share with a tiny audience some of my work with Jonny Liron, <em>and -- </em>best of all <em>-- </em>sink a few of the transcendentally drinkable cocktails they named in honour of our residency: <a href="http://soundcloud.com/television-garden-city/the-no-good-life" target="_blank">The Goode Life</a>. (Vodka, honey bourbon, peach schnapps, and I can't remember the rest; in fact I can't remember much about those evenings at all, come to think of it.)<br /><br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ubVsRDOHVcI/UsGCl2ok_NI/AAAAAAAAD2s/VeHTC90kyr0/s1600/jo_queen.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="266" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ubVsRDOHVcI/UsGCl2ok_NI/AAAAAAAAD2s/VeHTC90kyr0/s400/jo_queen.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br />Jo Clifford in <em>The Gospel According to Jesus, Queen of Heaven</em><br />at the BikeShed Theatre, Exeter, as part of the CG&amp;Co residency<br />Photo: Jonny Liron</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-lQFBOwWKQ0I/UsQcheeV3YI/AAAAAAAAD4U/uG5SBHi-nGI/s1600/WP_000050.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-lQFBOwWKQ0I/UsQcheeV3YI/AAAAAAAAD4U/uG5SBHi-nGI/s400/WP_000050.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br />Lining up the Goode Lifes at the BikeShed, &amp; may the Lord have mercy</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><br />Then in the autumn we started work on <i>Albemarle </i>in (something that was more recognisable as) earnest, with two weeks' R&amp;D in London on the theatre stuff, and a week with our friends at West Yorkshire Playhouse on the dance element: and in the weekend in between, the dance guys met the theatre guys for the first time -- so we were all in one room, just briefly, for what might be the only time until we get pretty close to&nbsp;unveiling the final show; and on the Sunday of that weekend, we invited in some other people for the first time, for an event called <i>The Albemarle Gathering</i>, at WYP. Those other people weren't an audience, exactly -- we didn't show anything from our work to date on <i>Albemarle</i> -- but just some friends and friends-of-friends whom we wanted to bring together to ask them to meet some of the ideas around the show, and to embark with them on a creative conversation through a mix of workshops, discussions and performances (and -- with dubious inevitability -- a screening of a vintage episode of <i>Sesame Street</i>). It was in some ways an odd occasion, in that the purpose of it wasn't entirely clear to everyone -- or I guess I'd say it was an event in the form of a question rather than an assertion -- but I got a lot out of it, and I think most folks did, one way or another.<br /><br /><i>Albemarle </i>is, straight up and down, the most challenging thing I've ever done: not so much for its scale and its artistic aspirations, but because it demands of me -- and asks of everyone, I think -- an unusual degree of openness and vulnerability. (Unusual even for my work, I'd like to say, if that weren't so emetically self-regarding.) It's an extremely personal piece that's forming; and though it wants to be about Utopian politics and big widescreen questions about the structures and ethics of social organization, it's also very deeply and inescapably about grief, and about sex, and about bodies and movement and transition and personal change, and about loss, and the risk of loss, and the necessity of that risk. And it's about freedom -- a word I still feel queasy just typing -- and what we do with it, and how we imagine ourselves in relation to it, not just in some abstract sense, but in the careful and curious and uninhibited occupying of every moment we spend with each other. And for me, above all -- and here I will lose some of you to the sick bay, I'm sure, so give Matron a kiss from me&nbsp;-- it's about the ways in which we build walls and complicated marble-runs around ourselves so that we don't have to deal too directly with the radical disturbance of being loved&nbsp;and being forgiven. There is that somewhat cliched injunction that kicks around -- <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSA6dU-2_Js" target="_blank">"Dance like there's nobody watching"</a>; <i>Albemarle </i>is asking exactly that of all of us who are making it, in the knowledge that people <i>are </i>watching and <i>will </i>watch -- and <i>must </i>watch, if the thing is to make any sense in the world: and it will ask the same of everyone who sees the show in the end, and of the bigger 'us' who are trying to live together in a society that so often insists it can't and mustn't be changed. Ultimately I suppose it's a deeply challenging rehearsal room to be in because it requires that we live there, for real, right now,&nbsp;in the way that normally we vaguely dream of living with each other at some point in the future, beyond some personal <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHqzgcoHxMk" target="_blank">blue horizon</a> -- with (as close as we can get, each day, to) absolute truthfulness, total openness, complete nakedness; not an absence of fear, but an acknowledgement of it, and a willingness to run in company towards it. The finished show, whenever and wherever it finally emerges -- you can imagine this one's a hard, hard sell -- is going to be quite something: I think I&nbsp;can promise you that already.<br /><br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ZPIFJ4j2kE8/UsGDcirCZMI/AAAAAAAAD28/ii6OdyxqevQ/s1600/RDW13_Chris+Goode_051.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="266" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ZPIFJ4j2kE8/UsGDcirCZMI/AAAAAAAAD28/ii6OdyxqevQ/s400/RDW13_Chris+Goode_051.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br />Family photo of Team Albemarle<br />back L to R: Ric Watts, Theron Schmidt, Jeni Draper, Jonny Liron, CG<br />mid L to R: Jo Clifford, Amy Letman, Tom Ross-Williams, Kristina Hjelm, Toke Strandby, Akeim Buck<br />front L to R: Naomi Dawson, Jamie Wood, Pauline Mayers<br />[not pictured: Maddy Costa, Heather Uprichard]<br />Photo: Richard Davenport</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><br />Outside of CG&amp;Co, there was lots more going on: most notably, I suppose, in collaborating with the pre-diabetic Artful Dodger of the British glamourwear scene, the thankfully unique <a href="http://www.scottee.co.uk/" target="_blank">Scottee</a>, with whom I co-devised and directed <i><a href="http://www.scottee.co.uk/#!live/sitepage_2" target="_blank">The Worst Of Scottee</a></i>, his first concerted solo foray into the legitimate theatre. I can't tell you how much I enjoyed doing this. I mean I can't tell you because then he'd know -- not that he'll read this, of course, he's much too busy drinking tequila out of Cleo Rocos's slingbacks,&nbsp;and anyway he's dyslexic, <em>but</em> he has a whole cohort of spaced-out goblins and faeries who do his bidding and monitor every media channel 24 hours a day just in case someone -- anyone -- has said something -- anything -- about him that he can retweet in his balls-out pursuit of absolute power, or failing which, Absolute Power, which will certainly be the title of&nbsp;his Saturday night game show on BBC1, when they finally give it to him. ...Actually, who cares? Do your worst, you goblin twats. I bloody loved working with Scottee. He and I go way back: when I became artistic director of <a href="http://www.cptheatre.co.uk/" target="_blank">Camden People's Theatre</a> in 2001, I inherited a Young People's Theatre company whose absolute lynchpin was a fourteen-year-old (ish?) Scott Gallagher: cheeky, charming, confident and camp on the outside, and plainly trembling like a bunny vibrator turned up to 11 on the inside. During my tenure, Scott started getting seriously absorbed by club culture and by the time&nbsp;we both&nbsp;left CPT, and on the rare occasions that we'd bump into each other after that as he continued to develop his performance craft and pursue a horrifyingly viable career, I found him pretty intimidating: so, while I'd watched his progress with a lot of interest and some quasi-paternal pride, I wasn't at all sure, when the approach came late last year, that he and I would work very happily together. But the person I found waiting for me at the Roundhouse was someone completely else: warm, funny, sweet (even at his most excellently waspish), and at the same time incredibly focused, and ambitious not only for success but for excellence. We developed <i>The Worst Of Scottee </i>from his bare-bones idea across three periods of close collaboration, much of that time spent one-on-one, and it was consistently an incredibly stimulating and rewarding process. I think he might be the hardest-working artist I know, and I utterly adore that level of focus and productivity in people. He's also -- as anyone who's seen the show will know -- extraordinarily brave. All of which is true: and yet I should also record that much of our time was spent cackling with laughter and high on M&amp;S biscuits. I was so thrilled when <i>WoS </i>did so well at Edinburgh, and I'm pleased for him that it's been a really great success on tour, too. (It <a href="http://www.roundhouse.org.uk/whats-on/productions/the-worst-of-scottee" target="_blank">comes into London in February</a>, straight after a frankly indefensible jaunt to Melbourne.) I am slightly appalled at the gushiness of this paragraph, but what can I do? Scottee is simply the nicest, most talented, absolute fucking cunt I've ever worked with for the money.<br /><br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-df4ustg-j8I/UsQg_E6RYmI/AAAAAAAAD4g/4vA0L0rvBy4/s1600/Scottee_H_0.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="253" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-df4ustg-j8I/UsQg_E6RYmI/AAAAAAAAD4g/4vA0L0rvBy4/s400/Scottee_H_0.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br />Scottee at his <em>Worst</em>. Your taxes pay for this fucking mess.</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><br />The other solo performance I had a hand in this year -- or only a finger really, but a happy finger -- was <a href="http://laurajanedean.com/" target="_blank">Laura Jane Dean</a>'s genuinely extraordinary <i>Head Hand Head</i>, on which I worked as a mentor, i.e. one third flying doctor, two thirds hand-waving chum. Laura's piece, about her personal experience of living with OCD, was already mostly in place when I first joined her and her splendid director Daisy Orton at their rehearsal base in Faversham: it just needed a fresh eye on it, and a bit of a rejig, and some cheerleading -- and they both welcomed me so generously into their process that all of those roles were easy to undertake. I think the show that eventuated is a really remarkable piece of work: I can't think of a piece of theatre, except possibly Ridiculusmus's seminal <i>Yes Yes Yes</i>, that has more completely located me, as an audience member, inside someone else's head; Laura's ability to capture in the rhythms of her writing the characteristic patterns of her OCD is amazing, and consequently the show has a genuinely revelatory aspect that is fascinating and compelling -- and potentiated by the obvious precariousness of someone with OCD performing work that so clearly captures and recreates their own experience: the line between simulation and self-harm feels&nbsp;awesomely perilous sometimes, not least because Laura's performance foregrounds the fragility of her situation and only intermittently allows us also to see her resilience. I'm glad the piece has done so well, and been of use not only to general audiences but also to mental health service users in particular. In the coming year I'll be working with Laura again on the next stage of the same project, and I'm excited to see what emerges.<br /><br />All right, nearly there: shall we just do a quick skim of the rest? -- <i>Oh, can we, Chris, can we really? </i>Yes, dears, we can. -- <i>Chronologically? </i>[laughs affectionately] Chronologically? Okay, sure. Why not. [ruffles your hair]<br /><br />January's easy: I was super-ill and mostly in bed going "blee". Also the illness made me deaf for at least three weeks so when I wasn't in bed going "blee" I was out and about going "pardon?".<br /><br />In February the estimable Nick Ridout invited me to take part in an event called 'Life After Work' at QMUL, talking about theatre-as-work, about the ways in which we see theatre as and not-as labour. I probably shouldn't have taken the gig really, I wanted to say yes to Nick but in the event I felt massively in-the-wrong-place; I don't think I said anything very useful and I certainly made one person very cross -- academic audiences are almost always intensely competitive and inordinately pious (or perhaps that's just how it seems to one who doesn't speak their language or drink their slushies) -- but if nothing else it was interesting to listen to fellow contributor <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/profile/nina-power" target="_blank">Nina Power</a>, a thinker I admire. Later on in the month I was part of a panel on queer theatre, following on from Emma Adams's supercool show <i><a href="http://www.ovalhouse.com/whatson/detail/freakoid" target="_blank">Freakoid</a></i> at Ovalhouse, and again I didn't feel&nbsp;all that&nbsp;comfortable being there: pronouncing on 'queer' is always a hiding to nothing, because half the audience think they and their friends own 'queer' (an error one is of course simultaneously committing oneself just by being on the panel and opening one's mouth), and the other half are deeply suspicious of, or uncomprehending of, queerness as a tactical position anyway. Where those two groups found common ground, interestingly, was in the idea that queerness, as nothing more than a strategy for reading or looking with, has no intrinsic relationship to sexuality. I can see the appeal in that airy hospitality but it seems to me a peculiarly Thatcherite construction of 'queer', and one I'm inclined to resist, though I suspect it's gaining ground among people who read a lot of cultural theory and/or grow a lot of beard.<br /><br />February's big adventure, though, was This Is Tomorrow, at Warwick Arts Centre. It's like a week-long slow-mo (but more stuffed than Mr Creosote) speed date in which a group of raggle-taggle artists-o! meet an assortment of academics from different faculties of the University -- in our case, Physics, Manufacturing, Economics, Sociology, Politics and International Studies, and Mathematics. It was all properly mind-expanding (and a little bit manglesome) -- we began the week finding out how to make a computer out of fish and ended it playing four-dimensional noughts-and-crosses -- and the middle of the week was disquietingly inflected for me by what felt like a bunch of unacknowledged premises about what universities are for -- Warwick seems very like a business park in some ways, and it was only really in the Sociology and Politics departments, and some pockets of Mathematics, that the pressure to innovate seemed to feed something other than the advancement of sleek high-end&nbsp;capitalism. But it was incredibly valuable to be asked to engage with disciplines and worldviews that don't normally penetrate the bubble of the creative arts: and I got to hang out with an amiable bunch of artists and makers -- the amazing <a href="http://www.vincentdt.com/bios/charlotte.html" target="_blank">Charlotte Vincent</a>, <a href="http://www.recordeddelivery.net/about.html" target="_blank">Alecky Blythe</a>, Robin Rimbaud (a.k.a. <a href="http://www.scannerdot.com/" target="_blank">Scanner</a> -- of whom I've long been a big fan; lovely to meet him and find him far more naughty schoolboy than creepy aloof IDM/surveillance dude), <a href="http://www.michellebrowne.net/" target="_blank">Michelle Browne</a> and the 'embedded' Matt Trueman, whose <a href="http://matttrueman.co.uk/2013/03/this-is-tomorrow.html" target="_blank">accounts of the week</a> -- astonishingly, written mostly while the week itself was unfolding -- capture brilliantly its highs and not-so-muches. Lovely to spend some quality time too with Ed Collier and Paul Warwick of <a href="http://www.chinaplatetheatre.com/" target="_blank">China Plate</a>, who curate This is Tomorrow (and shape its arc&nbsp;rather cleverly, it turned out) and who kept injecting it, and us, with energy and curiosity when things inevitably flagged from time to time. In the coming year, CG&amp;Co hopes to make a start with WAC on a project arising out of my own response to some of the ideas that came through in the week; whatever may happen to that project, the experience of This is Tomorrow has already been, voluminously, its own reward.<br /><br />A fun, though bittersweet, gig at Easter was appearing as The Voice Of God in <i>The Passion of the STK</i>, the cheerfully outlandish farrago through which we bid goodbye to <a href="http://www.stkinternational.co.uk/STK/STK.html" target="_blank">Stoke Newington International Airport</a>, and it to us. STK was a fantastic space and a lovely project; I performed there many times, and saw loads of good things over the years. We miss it already, and it was hard to say farewell (though Lord knows the boys deserved a break). Unfortunately I couldn't get down to any of the performances of the <i>Passion</i> but <a href="http://www.fluidr.com/photos/paulbennun/sets/72157633131137090" target="_blank">photo documentation</a> suggests that something very peculiar indeed took place, which is exactly as it should be. I can only really do two voices, so God ended up sounding like Wound Man (and, before him, Badger, from <em>Wind in the Willows</em>, May Week 1995), but that sweet dufferish quality seemed to suit the Almighty pretty well.<br /><br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-xnxFOMB90yY/UsGGSjepMxI/AAAAAAAAD3I/XMCfX2C8ipA/s1600/8605076114_8bb37c9b83_o.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-xnxFOMB90yY/UsGGSjepMxI/AAAAAAAAD3I/XMCfX2C8ipA/s400/8605076114_8bb37c9b83_o.jpg" width="266" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br />Gregor Henderson-Begg and Mamoru Iriguchi<br /><em>The Passion of the STK</em><br />Photo: Paul Bennun</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><br />STK had also been our host venue for the first season of <a href="http://chrisgoodeandco.podbean.com/" target="_blank">Thompson's Live</a>, the podcast series with which I tried to keep the idea of this blog faintly alive during its hiatus. The second season, which started in March and ran through to July, was peripatetic, partly as a way of countering the inevitable complaints that the first series had been too London-centric. So it came on the road with CG&amp;Co, wherever we happened to be, kicking off at CPT and taking in Bradford's Theatre in the Mill, the NT Studio, QMUL, TR2 in Plymouth, Pulse in Ipswich, the BikeShed in Exeter, and ending up at the Centre for Creative Collaboration under the aegis of RHUL. (Still a fair bit of London, then. Sorry.) Most of the episodes, I think, work pretty well, and one or two very well indeed, so it's worth exploring the archive if you didn't hear them as they came out (you can get at them via iTunes if you don't care for the Podbean site); I'd have loved to do more, but it's a time-consuming process and quietly expensive too, so I suspect that's the end of the line for now unless we can find some kind of funding for them.<br /><br />In April CG&amp;Co had a staggeringly intense week at the NT Studio working on <i>The Witch of Edmonton</i>, an extraordinary and seldom-performed Jacobean play of which I've been trying to mount a production for getting on for twenty years now (since I originally encountered it as a first-year undergraduate). It's an odd play, to say the least, thrilling but bonkers really, and hard to do effectively with fewer than twelve actors, which of course makes it prohibitively expensive. I've spent some time in the rehearsal room with it before, most promisingly a few years ago when Headlong were interested in supporting a production, though that in the end came to nothing (if getting massively fucked-over amounts to 'nothing', as perhaps it does in this sector); this time around, it was more pretext than text, in that I was interested to experiment with CG&amp;Co's Open House format, which we'd tried as a standalone project a couple of times but never applied to work on an existing play. Essentially, Open House places a core company at the middle of the activity but then says that anybody else who wants to can come in and be a part of the process, in any way they like -- whether watching from the sidelines, or getting stuck in to some acting, or whatever mode of engagement takes their fancy from day to day. Approaching <i>The Witch of Edmonton</i> through that frame was, ultimately, unexpectedly, terrifying: there's something very liberatory about the Open House format, but what got liberated in <em>this</em> room, particularly mid-week, was scary stuff, the malign spirit of a frightening play, unleashed and freakily intoxicating. (I know this sounds like superstitious&nbsp;luvvie bullshit: but it really was very palpable in the room, especially in the confrontation of some of the actors with the horrible misogyny lurking in the play.) I think almost everyone wigged out at some point, pushed either by the play or by the demands of the Open House process (or both), and we lost one actor at the end of the first day, which cast a gloomy and complicating shadow over the remainder of the week. But, but, <em>but</em>. On the last day, we did a pretty full performance of the play -- ravishingly mutilated, adulterated, and <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7GeKLE0x3s" target="_blank">not necessarily in the right order</a> -- in which the core company were accompanied with several additional actors taking advantage of the open door: and I'm not sure I've ever seen anything that I've initiated that in the enacting has so closely and tantalizingly resembled the theatre I most want to be making. Indulgent I'm sure, but I found it utterly exhilarating. It felt dangerous, complex, unpredictable, but also composed, controlled, lucid: it was, I think,&nbsp;a richly textured performance of the play, but it was also a performance <i>about </i>the play, and about the week, and about us and what we needed from each other. For a while I incubated the hope that at some point before the end of the year we might be able to regroup and show some advance on these workings to an audience, but again, even on the measliest shoestring, I couldn't find a way to make the necessary ends meet. So, I don't suppose it'll ever happen now: apart from anything else, it feels like the time and the culture that that play could speak to with such authority is slightly slipping away; well, perhaps I feel that our week at the Studio has, at least temporarily, and at last, scratched that itch. I really want to record my thanks to the core company: Nigel Barrett, Lizzie Crarer, Tom Frankland, Wendy Hubbard, Sam Ladkin, Jonny Liron and Rick Warden: they were totally, totally the right people at the right time, and their&nbsp;intrepidity knocked me for seven-and-a-half.<br /><br />A nice little thing in May... -- wait, wait, is this boring yet? It is, isn't it? I've turned in to one of those people who sends a round-robin letter with their Christmas card, basking in the warming certainty that it's important to you to know exactly when and where they bought their lawnmower: I'm sorry, I'm sorry, look, just skip bits, OK, or go and make a sandwich and come back later...<br /><br />A nice little thing in May was a chat -- billed as a 'salon' but basically a really enjoyable chat -- about documentary and verbatim theatre at <a href="http://theyardtheatre.co.uk/" target="_blank">The&nbsp;Yard</a>. I really like the Yard, I hope eventually between us Jay and I will find a way for me to do something there. In the meantime, this was an interesting conversation to be a part of, and there was a genuine sense of engagement around the table: and so my hasty back-of-envelope scribble seemed for once to amount to something helpful as we discussed matters arising. Particularly fascinating to hear Alecky talk about <a href="http://www.ideastap.com/IdeasMag/the-knowledge/alecky-blythe-london-road-on-verbatim-theatre" target="_blank">her process</a>. I certainly don't feel I have any expertise in verbatim -- it's an area I've only dabbled in a handful of times -- but somehow the questions that arise feel really close to my deepest concerns, about what a 'voice' is on stage and who makes it and out of what stuff.<br /><br />These days I seem to do, on average, one poetry reading a year, and this year's was the launch night of an evening called Benefits, curated by <a href="http://www.stevewilley.com/" target="_blank">Steve Willey</a> and <a href="http://byproductions.tumblr.com/" target="_blank">Tom Bamford</a> at (on that occasion) a joint called Power Lunches just south of Dalston. It was an amiable mess of an evening, and I suppose my reading was aligned both in terms of mess and (at a stretch) amiability: but it was really nice to be asked, and there was a lot to like in the scope of the event: not just in the accommodation of performance work, video material, improvised music and so on, but also in its attachment to grassroots activism -- especially, in this case, its links to <a href="http://houseofbrag.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">House of Brag</a>, the London Queer Social Centre. For some reason, the alternative theatre scene (in London, at least; I suspect regional mileage may vary) seems to find it harder than the poets do to forge explicitly those sorts of links or engage in that kind of dialogue and platform-sharing. Perhaps in theatre we can tend to view our own work too easily as being already, almost intrinsically, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHbfZiE1D50" target="_blank">active with the activists</a>, because what we do appears to have immediate social ramifications. I'm not so sure that that's necessarily true, or at least, that it's sufficient. Note to self, etc etc.<br /><br />One surprising invitation in the summer came from Mark Ravenhill, who asked me if I'd talk to him in relation to his project <i><a href="http://partially-obstructed-view.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/theatre-review-surprise-theatre-cakes.html" target="_blank">Cakes and Finance</a></i> for Open Court, in which the words of a number of playwrights -- Simon Stephens, Tim Crouch, April de Angelis, Philip Ridley and so on -- were collaged, creating a map of responses to his provocations around envisioning our 'dream theatre'. (Somehow by the time the piece emerged this had been rephrased as 'ideal theatre', which to me has rather different significations, but no matter.) It was amazing to be asked -- I'm hardly ever 'seen' (or so I think) as a 'playwright', especially by other playwrights&nbsp;-- and, given the company I was keeping, extremely flattering. Mark and I had an interesting if slightly stilted conversation for an hour or so -- I'd never properly talked to him before, and I dare say a more fluent dialogue emerged with those interviewees with whom he already shared some degree of being at-ease. So the conversation stayed fairly superficial, as if Mark's ear was cocked for soundbites rather than open to genuine dialogue; it's interesting too&nbsp;that the piece that emerged was widely described promotionally as "tongue-in-cheek", which is not a tonal element that was in any way implied in the invitation to participate, or explicit in that conversation: none of what <em>I </em>said was tongue-in-cheek, at any rate, though perhaps the pretensions of the likes of me deserve to be gently skewered from a platform&nbsp;at the Royal Court. Anyway, after an essentially congenial hour&nbsp;it was all over very quickly and weirdly abruptly -- "Howard Brenton's on his way up", said Mark, looking at his phone, and suddenly Howard Brenton was right there, and that was exactly that --&nbsp;though, to be fair, I imagine maybe Mark might have said&nbsp;such florid things as "goodbye" and "thank you" had Howard Brenton <i>not </i>been on his way up. Whatevs, no? I left feeling mostly like the world of proper playwrights is yet another zone in which I am at best a licensed trespasser. I couldn't attend <i>Cakes and Finance </i>in person;&nbsp;a video of it can (or could) apparently be found online. But it was interesting to watch the piece refracted through Twitter responses and blog reviews; one common theme is that the whole exercise was a bit self-indulgent, amounting to little more than a conversation between Mark and the closed circle of "his mates". Well, I feel a lot of quite conflicted things about Mark Ravenhill, many of them exceedingly positive: but on the back of that one chinwag and the perfunctory email exchange that preceded it, I'm disinclined to mistake myself for his "mate", as it goes.<br /><br />A particular ongoing pleasure this year has been the amount of time I've been lucky to spend in work rooms and adjacent cafes and pubs with <a href="http://www.jamiewood.org.uk/" target="_blank">Jamie Wood</a>, one of my oldest friends in the business (and an Associate Artist with CG&amp;Co), and someone whose continuing refinement and expansion of his craft is a constant inspiration and delight: the amount he's grown in stature as an artist and in quiet wisdom as a person over the past decade is really astonishing, and he's someone to whom I really look up, now more than ever: his lightness and his generosity are nothing less than beautiful to be around. So when I was asked to do a four-day 'masterclass' at the Junction in September, to coincide with the arrival of <i>Monkey Bars </i>in Cambridge, I instantly knew I wanted him to co-lead it with me -- and I can't think of a better decision I've made this year. The workshop we offered was structured around a three-part analysis of creative practice, which we called <a href="http://www.londonplaywrightsblog.com/?p=643" target="_blank">'The Why Axis: depth, ground, elevation'</a>. Weak pun aside, it felt like an interesting lens with which to ask our participant artists to reflect on their work and their reasons for making it: to consider a journey starting in depth (roots, inheritance, lineage, cultural background, life-story), moving through ground (the here-and-now of site- and time-specificity, ongoing conversations and collaborations, responsiveness, variation, modes of presence), and into elevation or altitude (aspiration, hope, development, looking to the future; broader themes, bigger aims, jazz hands). As ever with these things, a diverse group of artists who've signed up to be challenged or gently disturbed is not necessarily an easy room to manage, but I was really excited by some of the work that emerged, and the conversations that began (some of which are still continuing). In particular, what came through really strongly and sort of upsettingly is the extent to which the psyches and the creative imaginations of even really talented and successful artists are often nonetheless still being patrolled by the kinds of bullies and border guards that may have tormented them in the playground or belittled their ambitions as they started out: the almost visceral phobia of being seen, or having one's work perceived, as 'self-indulgent' or 'pretentious' or 'over-intellectual' or 'over-sharing' or 'narcissistic' or 'quasi-therapeutic'. (Or just plain old 'wanky'.) The picture looms of a shadowy audience shouting for "Less! Less!" All terribly English. I really want to try and do some more work on this self-denying bullshit with my peers, and perhaps especially with more emerging artists -- not that I'm wholly immune to those anxieties myself, but I think there's a difference between, on the one hand, being watchful in what you make and considering its public valency, and, on the other, feeling constrained or even paralysed in your sense of where as an artist you might want to go exploring, for fear that your bravery will be denigrated or your thoughtfulness lampooned as inherently risible.<br /><br />As the year started to draw to a close I managed to gatecrash a great party: <i>Calm Down, Dear -- A festival of feminism </i>at CPT. I've never done this before: I wrote to Brian and Jenny and asked if they could squeeze me in, and to my great delight they found me a slot near the end of the season. So I took in one of my anthology performances -- as you might know, I've been doing these for years (since the first, <i>Mixed Ape</i>, with Jamie Wood in 2006), performing hour(ish)-long collations of marginal and otherwise overlooked performance texts, experimental poems, event scores, vocal outbursts, Fluxus <a href="http://www.peterserafinowicz.com/brian-butterfield/New%20Page%201_files/diet.htm" target="_blank">bonbonbonbons</a>, and so on: they're huge fun to do and it feels to me that they serve a useful purpose&nbsp;by reintroducing into the animation of live space a whole array of historically significant material that, by dint of its 'avant garde' [scare quotes] nature, tends to be consigned to the&nbsp;sin-bin of specialist study, the textbook, the archive, the vitrine -- where, of course, it's encountered as plain text with a polite white border around it and a noiseless scholarly aura holding it in place, rather than performed among people, with all the volatility and spit-flecks that implies. For CPT on this occasion I put together something called <i>Weird Sisters</i>, which followed a similar pattern to previous anthologies except that everything I read/performed was written (or in whatever way originated) by a woman -- going back exactly one hundred years to Mina Loy and Gertrude Stein, and coming right up to date with Dodie Bellamy and Hannah Silva. I crammed in a load of stuff and I have almost no memory of the performance itself, apart from a woozy adrenalin rush and two excruciating minutes of badly fucking up an extract from <em>Façade </em>that I'd done flawlessly in rehearsal all week. I do also remember the precarious headiness of the climax -- building adequately towards which had been the overriding task for the foregoing hour -- in which I did five minutes of Marina Abramovic's <i><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBVzJI6m72A" target="_blank">Freeing the Voice</a></i>. (If you've just joined us, the name of that particular game is to scream continuously until you lose your voice.) With regard to the evening as a whole, there was lots to feel mildly anxious about -- as I acknowledged in my introduction to the performance -- in being a male performer making use of (appropriating, then?) the work of women artists; but I did think there was something pretty interesting, to me at least, in the context of that evening and that festival, in inviting an audience to watch, at the end,&nbsp;a man trying extremely hard to destroy (or, at least, temporarily decommission) his own voice. -- Anyway, people seemed to find the whole thing intriguing and useful, by and large, and I'm awfully glad to have been a part of such a worthwhile season. CPT is now, more than ever -- certainly more than I was ever able to make it -- an absolutely vital spot on the dial.<br /><br />I do just want to mention in passing that November also saw the first amateur staging of my <i>The Adventures of Wound Man and Shirley</i> -- which I was particularly pleased about because it was a secondary school production. Sadly I wasn't able to go and see the Year 11's at Nunnery Wood High School do their thing, but their teacher Mr Burford was kind enough to send me a programme and some photographs and, I have to say, it looks bloody great. They seem to have had a good time doing it: and, anyway, it's just incredible to me that it happened at all. I mean, at base, <i>Wound Man and Shirley </i>is about a love relationship between a gay fourteen-year-old boy and an eccentric middle-aged man with a predilection for teenagers and snazzy pants; for that to be allowed within ten miles of a school is, to someone like me who spent his own teenage years in the toxic shade of Section 28, completely mindblowing. I couldn't be more proud of the whole darn thing.<br /><br />And that, I guess, brings us up to date: except that I feel like I can't finish this without saying something about the work that's particularly been on my mind this Christmas. A few days ago, I spent a bit of time putting together in book form some of the photographs that have emerged from my work with Jonny Liron over the past couple of years under our duo name Action one19 (A119 for short). Jonny and I have been working together in an exceptionally intense and exploratory partnership ever since our first collaboration, <i>Hey Mathew</i> in 2008; the work has only infrequently, though not I think insubstantially, reached an audience, but it's been a more-or-less constant (and, for both of us I think, constantly game-changing) dynamic in both our lives, especially behind the mostly closed doors of the Situation Room, Jonny's live/work space in South Tottenham. Right from the start a lot of the work has focused on developing 'personas' -- not quite characters, but provisional identities defined mostly by modalities of clothing and, out of that, different idiolects of movement, tonalities of presence, registers of interaction: it's delicate (though robust), painstaking, erotically agitated work, both compulsive and incredibly precise. Right from the start, we've made research work specifically for the video camera, but at the beginning of 2012 we started working with still images too, as a way of capturing and cataloguing these sometimes fleeting persona identities. I have zero prowess as a photographer, really, but it turns out that it's partly a numbers game -- we've often emerged from a couple of hours' work with a set of, say, 800 digital shots to look through, and there'll usually be a dozen, perhaps, that really work. So, two years on, it felt like a good time -- an important time -- to put some of those photographs together and see how they might speak to each other -- and outwards, to us, at a difficult moment.<br /><br />I say 'difficult' because the context in which I've been looking back over those images is&nbsp;a fraught one, in that A119 hasn't really been operative since June. The reason for that is partly -- perhaps mostly -- circumstantial; but it's also at some level ideological -- sort of like the 'creative differences' that split bands apart, I guess, though it has felt more profound than that, I suppose because our work has always been entangled in our intimate friendship. (I suppose that must be true of many bands too.) It's not possible, I think, at this stage, to know for sure whether this hiatus is permanent, though I must admit I'm presently kind of low on hope: which is partly to say, I suppose, that I <i>absolutely</i> want the work -- and the multiple overlapping relationships around it and beneath it -- to continue; I feel like there's loads for us still to do, and, more pressurefully and to that extent unhelpfully, it certainly feels to me that I can't continue to pursue this trajectory of refinement in relation to this body of work without Jonny, who has always united a range of personal qualities and creative and political interests that make him an utterly unique artist in my experience: so if he steps decisively away, it's going to be a full-stop on what I take to be the most important chapter of my work as a maker -- and that's a catastrophic prospect, like for real, whether my therapist likes it or not :) I put the photobook together partly as a way of inviting Jonny to see, or to re-see, how incredibly gifted and talented he is -- underscoring which is I suppose a feeling (one of those annoying ones with no real base of evidence or integrity of argument to support it) that, while it's important that absolutely everyone has the opportunity to explore their own creative and artistic abilities, it's also important to recognize that some people really do have an unusual degree of talent, that,&nbsp;for better or worse,&nbsp;lifts them out of the ordinary: a gift for making or just for being in a certain way, an aptitude or a certain charisma: and I suppose for me such gifts confer a responsibility -- perhaps an unfair one, and anyway, as I say, this is one of those things one just believes without quite being able to say why, so perhaps it's all bobbins.<br /><br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/--6KwKFDICAc/UsGG7tPzUzI/AAAAAAAAD3Q/eRdbN_fs5IE/s1600/IMG_2654_c.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/--6KwKFDICAc/UsGG7tPzUzI/AAAAAAAAD3Q/eRdbN_fs5IE/s400/IMG_2654_c.jpg" width="266" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br />Jonny Liron in Action at the Situation Room,&nbsp;summer 2013<br />Photo: CG</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><br />Needless to say, I don't for a moment want to pressurize Jonny or force his hand or ask him to do anything his heart's no longer in -- or to have to make any decisions while his principal experience of his body and intelligence in the world is a heavy burden of fatigue; for as long as it takes, my urgent desire to carry on doing this work, and my panic that it won't be possible, is my own business, and I hope I can do my best to be an honest broker as we continue to try and figure things out. And if putting together that book of photographs turns out to be a ritual of ending rather than (as I hope it might be) an encouragement to renewed action, then I at least want nothing to happen now to occlude the pride that I think we both ought to take in the work we've done together over the past few years. Not, I think, for nothing, even now,&nbsp;does Jonny have 'A119' tattooed on his lip: the company name, after all, derives from <i>The West Wing</i>, and we've always been propelled by a sense that our work has a certain altitude. In fact I suspect it might be exactly that presumption of altitude, or of significance of any kind (and the horse of white cis-male able-bodied privilege that it rides in on)&nbsp;that makes Jonny most suspicious right now. It's certainly true that this period is proving with terrible clarity that our enemies -- capitalism and (rather more my allergy than his) heteronormativity -- are not abstractions we're tussling with on some theoretical plane but ruinous, deleterious forces in our intimate lives, every fucking day. But, as somebody once wrote -- was it Goethe? Was it Hölderlin? -- <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoO_1FFr56k" target="_blank">"we're still so young, and we hope for more."</a> (Aren't we? Don't we? Maybe not. Maybe I'm lost in a fantasy of my own overheated devising here.) And if we can't turn those forces against themselves, if we can't create cracks of resistance and defiance even in the midst of the onrush of life-denying shit, if our only response is retreat and hibernation,&nbsp;then we're straight-up-and-down doing the coalition's dirty work for it, and what in God's name are we for.<br /><br />Well, I guess this is a knot for time to untie, but I won't lie to you, Banksters: I'm pretty heartbroken at what's become of us these last six months, and I hope things will somehow resolve, even if they can't resolve the way I want. We did some of our best work ever together in May and June: and then it all just stopped, as though in the middle of a sentence. It's strange for that to feel like it was so long ago. I keep looking back over the video, the photographs, trying in vain to see the moment where Jonny lost heart. As his friend I could hardly&nbsp;be more proud of him for doggedly trying to square the circle of life; as his collaborator, I feel, mostly, abandoned and bereft and, worst of all, confused: no matter how many times he reminds me, or I remind myself, that this is just a confluence of difficulties halfway beyond our control, I still lie awake at night wondering what I did wrong -- and, worse still,&nbsp;what the fuck I will do without him.<br /><br />You know, if I'm honest -- and it seems to be getting to that end of the post, doesn't it -- it's been a tough year, folks. Being properly ill in January was incredibly depleting -- I've never been in that much pain before, for that long, and I think even after I was back on my feet, my emotional reaction in the aftermath of those few weeks was pretty raw, so that took a long while to settle down -- it was well into the spring before I was really myself again. After that, it was all about getting stretched: going back into therapy to try and get a handle on my eating disorder; struggling once again with the presence (or not) of God (or not); reconnecting with family, and with old long-lost pals; the death (not unexpected, but a bit faster than I'd anticipated) of a friend who loomed very large in a number of ways in my teenage years; and alongside all that, the making of <i>Albemarle </i>-- which has entailed a lot of dancing (yikes), a lot of body stuff, a lot of emotional openness, a lot of not being what my therapist calls "a brain in a jar" -- plus all this disorientingly hard and draining stuff with Jonny. And half way through all that, I turned 40: which is probably what this is all about, one way or another, at bottom. (I'm pleased to note nonetheless that at 40 I am still entertained in all the wrong ways by the phrase "at bottom". Also, by way of balance, let us note that&nbsp;starting in August I watched the whole of <i>Dawson's Creek</i>, all six seasons, back-to-back, some of which I have to say I really enjoyed, and all of which amounted to 106 hours of my life in which I didn't have to think about anything else, except I suppose for quite wanting to get gruesomely ass-reamed by <a href="http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/M/MV5BMTY3MDE1MzMxOV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwNjAxNjQxNw@@._V1_SX640_SY720_.jpg" target="_blank">Dawson's dad</a> -- notwithstanding the fact that he kind of looks like Mitt Romney's secret gay brother).<br /><br />Messy, huh. But I'm thinking that that was probably exactly the year I needed; after all, much of what was hard, I invited in, and almost all of the stuff I didn't ask for was just the life-and-death stuff that everybody deals with, the tax you pay for being someone with the capacity to fall in love and care about people and want a better life for everyone. I suppose the <i>really </i>scary thing is that -- no, dears, 2013 wasn't the quiet year it might have seemed to be, but -- the year ahead looks set to be twice as busy and twice as demanding. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmW-ScmGRMA" target="_blank">Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit not having a blog any more.</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">* * *</div><br /><br />Well. That's quite enough of that devastating plain-text selfie (or deplatelfie, as the kids are all calling them). Let's stare at some other people for a bit. Somebody fire up <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uxre6KzfpJw" target="_blank">'Whole Lotta Love'</a> (or <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jbe6XVJhp_M" target="_blank">'Yellow Pearl'</a>, or <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_I7mDjkzjg" target="_blank">'The Wizard'</a>, according to your personal vintage): it's time for the charts:<br /><br /><br /><br /><b>Thompson's Top 20 Theatre* of 2013 (*almost entirely within the M25)</b><br /><br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-im84iOlkb9Q/UsGeF9d3BcI/AAAAAAAAD3s/eXXLHp8Ceg8/s1600/Heather+Cassils+by+Manuel+Vason.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="285" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-im84iOlkb9Q/UsGeF9d3BcI/AAAAAAAAD3s/eXXLHp8Ceg8/s400/Heather+Cassils+by+Manuel+Vason.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br />Heather Cassils photographed by <a href="http://www.manuelvason.com/">Manuel Vason</a></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><br />1&nbsp; Heather Cassils: <b><a href="http://www.spillfestival.com/performance/becoming-an-image/" target="_blank">Becoming an Image</a> </b>(SPILL at NT Studio)<br />2&nbsp; Tim Crouch &amp; a smith: <b><a href="http://www.almeida.co.uk/event/hope" target="_blank">what happens to hope at the end of the evening</a> </b>(Almeida)<br />3&nbsp; <b><a href="http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/shows/edward-ii" target="_blank">Edward II</a></b>, dir. Joe Hill-Gibbins (Olivier)<br />4&nbsp; The TEAM: <b><a href="http://theteamplays.org/work/mission-drift/" target="_blank">Mission Drift</a> </b>(NT Shed)<br />5&nbsp; Jamie Wood: <b><a href="http://festival.summerhall.co.uk/event/beating-mcenroe-2/" target="_blank">Beating McEnroe</a></b> (Camden People's Theatre)<br />6&nbsp; Peter McMaster: <b><a href="http://www.petermcmaster.org/#!__wutheringheights" target="_blank">Wuthering Heights</a></b> (BAC)<br />7&nbsp; Kieran Hurley: <b><a href="http://www.sohotheatre.com/whats-on/beats/" target="_blank">Beats</a> </b>(Soho) <br />8&nbsp; <b><a href="http://www.wyp.org.uk/what's-on/2013/my-generation/" target="_blank">My Generation</a> </b>by Alice Nutter, dir. Max Webster (West Yorkshire Playhouse)<br />9&nbsp; Chris Thorpe: <b><a href="http://www.sohotheatre.com/whats-on/there-has-possibly-been-an-incident/" target="_blank">There Has Possibly Been An Incident</a> </b>(Soho)<br />10 <b><a href="http://www.lyric.co.uk/whats-on/production/secret-theatre/" target="_blank">Secret Theatre: Show #1</a> </b>(Lyric, Hammersmith)<br />11 Dan Canham / Augusto Corrieri / Pig Dyke Molly Dancers: <b><a href="http://www.sadlerswells.com/screen/video/1949784539001" target="_blank">Wild Card</a> </b>(Lilian Baylis)<br />12 Robert Wilson: <b><a href="http://www.barbican.org.uk/theatre/event-detail.asp?ID=14073" target="_blank">John Cage: Lecture on Nothing</a> </b>(Barbican)<br />13 Nic Green: <b><a href="http://www.nicgreen.org.uk/#!__fatherland" target="_blank">Fatherland</a> </b>(BAC)<br />14 J. Fergus Evans: <b><a href="http://www.wordofwarning.org/current/2013-domestic/evans/index.html?utm_source=Word+of+Warning+Mailer&amp;utm_campaign=30ca3221a8-Word_of_Warning_Mailer2_24_2012&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_term=0_d72a36f1c2-30ca3221a8-327897489" target="_blank">My Heart is Hitch-Hiking Down Peachtree Street</a> </b>(Canada Water Culture Space)<br />15 Fabulous Beast: <b><a href="http://fabulousbeast.net/production/the-rite-of-spring-petrushka/" target="_blank">The Rite of Spring &amp; Petrushka</a> </b>(Sadlers Wells)<br />16 One Of Us&nbsp;/ Improbable: <b><a href="http://www.improbable.co.uk/work/beauty-and-beast/" target="_blank">Beauty and the Beast</a> </b>(Young Vic)<br />17 Angela Clerkin / Improbable: <b><a href="http://independentproductions.co.uk/project/the-bear/" target="_blank">The Bear</a> </b>(Ovalhouse)<br />18 Karen Christopher &amp; Sophie Grodin: <b><a href="http://www.haranczaknavarre.co.uk/performance.1.3.html" target="_blank">Control Signal</a> </b>(Chelsea Theatre)<br />19 Ross Sutherland: <b><a href="http://www.rosssutherland.co.uk/main/currently-touring/standby-for-tape-backup" target="_blank">Stand By For Tape Back-Up</a> </b>(Rosemary Branch)<br />20 <b><a href="http://www.athousandmilesofhistory.co.uk/" target="_blank">A Thousand Miles of History</a> </b>by &amp; dir. Harold Finley (Bussey Building) <br /><br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-6PF5ROwx0Ok/UsGfi1L5RAI/AAAAAAAAD34/Zy48nqg64aM/s1600/wuthering+heights.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="266" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-6PF5ROwx0Ok/UsGfi1L5RAI/AAAAAAAAD34/Zy48nqg64aM/s400/wuthering+heights.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br />Peter McMaster's <em>Wuthering Heights</em></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><br />First thing to say is, lots of friends represented here, which adds a whole layer of greebles to the basic-cable invidiousness: but that's in the nature of the exercise, and a very weirdly distorted list this would be if I expunged from it everyone I ever had a drink with in the Traverse bar or traded dog pics with on Twitter. I <i>have</i> omitted a couple of really wonderful pieces of work by friends that I saw this year as part of events that I myself curated -- that feels like it crosses the line -- but I think I can still at least say thanks to them: that is, to Theron Schmidt for <i>Some People Will Do Anything To Keep Themselves From Being Moved</i>, and to Jo Clifford for <i>The Gospel According to Jesus, Queen of Heaven</i>, both of which were part of the residency line-up at the BikeShed.<br /><br />It must seem -- and of course, also, it really is -- sort of abhorrent to rank artworks like this: even comparing the rantipole chutzpah of&nbsp;<i>Edward II </i>at the National with Fergus Evans handing out peaches in a janitorial supplies cupboard round the back of Canada Water library is inherently ridiculous, and I hope I do it not because it gives me a warm glow inside to assert that, say, <i>Wuthering Heights </i>was one metric&nbsp;unit of aceness better than <i>Beats</i>, but because thinking carefully through these orderings, rather than flinging twenty excellent shows at the wall in no particular order (a perfectly legitimate alternative), opens up for me a space in which to examine for myself a whole bunch of questions to do with the qualities and tendencies that I most value in other people's theatre, and perhaps by extension in my own.<br /><br />Sometimes, what my consideration of those questions throws up is deeply surprising. For example, one of the things that I really admire about <i>Becoming an Image</i> is that it's, to my mind, basically perfect. That is, it's a single capsule-like idea, smart and suggestive in its conceptualization, and faultless in its execution across the piece's thirty-minute duration. Compare and contrast that, then, with something like <i>Mission Drift</i>, which is a bundle of what sometimes seems like <i>all </i>the ideas, marshalled and thrillingly set in Brownian-esque motion by a whole bunch of incredibly smart makers, but nowhere <i>near </i>perfect -- and all the better for it. I think I'm the sort of person who likes that flawed complexity much more: and yet <i>Becoming an Image </i>got under my skin, and stayed there -- or, actually, in this case, remained imprinted on my retinas -- and in fact I feel it's still with me, almost every day: whereas mostly I've put <i>Mission Drift </i>down now, perhaps with the exception of a couple of the songs which still pop into my head from time to time.<br /><br />Somewhere in between those two poles is Peter McMaster's <i>Wuthering Heights</i>, which I certainly liked a lot at the time of seeing it, but which has grown in my estimation ever since, as I worried away at it, wondered at its movements, fretted over some of its choices; the things that felt most wrong with it have become the things that move me most about it. (Btw, naughty to say so about such an out-and-out ensemble work but Thom Scullion's was the best performance of the year for me: and, again, that's a feeling that's deepened across time, and mostly because of everything about it that I felt fretful about at the time.) <i>Wuthering Heights </i>had something of the promiscuity and compendiousness of <i>Mission Drift</i> in its material character and its organizing intelligence, but also a spareness, a lack of adornment, that felt closer to the economical live-art precision of Cassils's work.<br /><br />I have to take my hat off -- and my shoes, of course -- to Tim Crouch and Andy Smith: to my mind, <i>what happens to hope... </i>is Tim's best show so far (perhaps excluding from that judgement <i>The Author</i>, of which I don't think I can any longer pretend a measured assessment): others around me seemed to think it was minor Crouch, vamp-till-ready Crouch: and certainly it has an unassuming, impromptu-like nature, a quality of easy ventilation and quiet luminousness. What Tim's always supremely good at -- better than anyone, really -- is setting something up and then just letting it play itself out, moving methodically and truthfully through its ramifications, like an equation solving itself from the inside. And he's also amazingly good at something I often strive for myself but seldom achieve with such assurance, which is about setting something up at a formal level which, by working through its formal logic, creates -- compels -- the movement in the content, so you have the sense of the narrative laid gently over the top of the piece, almost like a grid against which you can check the plate shifts taking place at the structural level. At first glance this can appear to establish a situation in which the work is 'about' theatre -- and of course it is, in a way: but it's 'about' theatre at that <i>formal </i>level rather than the level of content, which means it's also directly and ineluctably about what's happening to <i>you</i> in the moment of your encounter with the work: so it can achieve an intimacy with its audience that can feel unsettlingly close, almost telepathic. Like some noise musicians seem to be -- or, in some cases, really are -- concertedly choreographing a vibratory dance for your skeleton and your internal organs, Tim and Andy's work seems to me to create tensions and releases directly in the body of the beholder, sensations which are only then routed through the analytical mind to become an intelligible argument. Quite slowly and gently and unhistrionically, it works like a car accident or like falling downstairs: the span of its happening is strangely quiet and un-'dramatic', and only in arrear do you start to establish a perceptually discriminating relationship with it; and only <i>then </i>does the adrenalin start to flow: and then it can still be disturbing your sleep a fortnight later.<br /><br />Don't worry, dears, I'm not going to write at length about everything on the list -- or, in fact, about anything else. I'll just say this before I stop: <em>Secret Theatre </em>at the Lyric is one of the reasons I'm reactivating this blog. There's been&nbsp;so much to say, and nowhere to say it. (Luckily, in the end, I got to say a fair bit of it to Simon Stephens over coffee, and he was sort of bewilderingly gracious about some of my more critical observations, meaning that I won't die of unexpressed sentiments transmogrifying into colon cancer. At least, not this time.)<br /><br />Oh, and Jamie Wood -- whose apparently fearless navigation of <i>Beating McEnroe</i> was, and is, one of the great performances I've ever seen in fringe theatre -- is making a show about Yoko Ono. There's literally nothing I'm looking forward to in 2014 more than that.<br /><br />Meanwhile, in the house next door:<br /><br /><br /><br /><b>Thompson's Top 30 Albums of 2013</b><br /><br /><br />1&nbsp; <b><a href="http://www.richarddawson.net/" target="_blank">Richard Dawson</a>&nbsp; </b>The Glass Trunk [Richie's Own Label]<br />2&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="http://jennyhval.com/music/innocence-is-kinky-album-2013" target="_blank"><strong>Jenny Hval</strong></a><strong>&nbsp; </strong>Innocence is Kinky [Rune Grammofon]<br />3&nbsp; <b><a href="http://jamesblakemusic.com/" target="_blank">James Blake</a>&nbsp; </b>Overgrown [Atlas]<br />4&nbsp; <a href="http://www.apparat.net/" target="_blank"><strong>Apparat</strong></a><strong>&nbsp; </strong>Krieg und Frieden [Mute]<br />5&nbsp; <b><a href="http://www.samamidon.com/" target="_blank">Sam Amidon</a>&nbsp; </b>Bright Sunny South [Nonesuch]<br />6&nbsp; <a href="http://www.hapna.com/H49.html" target="_blank"><strong>Time is a Mountain</strong></a>&nbsp; Time is a Mountain [Hapna]<br />7&nbsp; <b><a href="http://matanaroberts.com/" target="_blank">Matana Roberts</a>&nbsp; </b>Coin Coin Chapter Two: Mississippi Moonchile [Constellation]<br />8&nbsp; <b><a href="http://www.mybloodyvalentine.org/" target="_blank">My Bloody Valentine</a>&nbsp; </b>MBV [MBV Records]<br />9&nbsp; <b><a href="http://www.anothertimbre.com/variations.html" target="_blank">Christoph Schiller</a>&nbsp; </b>Variations [Another Timbre]<br />10&nbsp; <a href="http://www.hannoleichtmann.com/" target="_blank"><strong>Hanno Leichtmann</strong></a><strong>&nbsp; </strong>Minimal Studies [Mikrotron]<br />11&nbsp; <b><a href="http://cramrecords.bandcamp.com/releases" target="_blank">Javier Carmona</a>&nbsp; </b>Chamota [CRAM]<br />12&nbsp; <b><a href="http://www.erasedtapes.com/artists/biography/13/" target="_blank">Nils Frahm</a>&nbsp; </b>Spaces [Erased Tapes]<br />13&nbsp; <b><a href="http://boardsofcanada.com/vinyl-reissues/" target="_blank">Boards of Canada</a>&nbsp; </b>Tomorrow's Harvest [Warp]<br />14&nbsp; <a href="http://www.kanyewest.com/" target="_blank"><strong>Kanye West</strong></a><strong>&nbsp; </strong>Yeezus [Def Jam]<br />15&nbsp; <b><a href="http://www.thesenewpuritans.com/" target="_blank">These New Puritans</a>&nbsp; </b>Field of Reeds [Infectious Music]<br />16&nbsp; <b><a href="http://colleenplays.org/" target="_blank">Colleen</a>&nbsp; </b>The Weighing of the Heart [Second Language]<br />17&nbsp; <b><a href="http://atomsforpeace.info/" target="_blank">Atoms for Peace</a>&nbsp; </b>AMOK [XL Recordings]<br />18&nbsp; <b><a href="http://www.miauk.com/matangi">M.I.A.</a>&nbsp; </b>Matangi [Interscope]<br />19&nbsp; <b><a href="http://www.badabingrecords.com/press/richard-youngs/">Richard Youngs</a>&nbsp; </b>Summer Through My Mind [Ba Da Bing]<br />20&nbsp; <b><a href="http://www.davidbowie.com/">David Bowie</a>&nbsp; </b>The Next Day [ISO Records / Columbia]<br />21&nbsp; <b><a href="http://pearljam.com/">Pearl Jam</a>&nbsp; </b>Lightning Bolt [Monkeywrench / Republic]<br />22&nbsp; <b><a href="http://www.richardbuckner.com/">Richard Buckner</a>&nbsp; </b>Surrounded [Merge]<br />23&nbsp; <b><a href="http://phantasysound.co.uk/artist/connan-mockasin/">Connan Mockasin</a>&nbsp; </b>Caramel [Phantasy Sound]<br />24&nbsp; <b><a href="http://studioalexisgeorgopoulos.com/ARP">ARP</a>&nbsp; </b>More [Smalltown Supersound]<br />25&nbsp; <b><a href="http://ingrideel.com/">Ingrid Lee</a>&nbsp; </b>Mouth to Mouth [Another Timbre]<br />26&nbsp; <b><a href="http://www.midlake.net/">Midlake</a>&nbsp; </b>Antiphon [Bella Union]<br />27&nbsp; <b><a href="http://www.christianwallumrod.com/">Christian Wallumrød</a>&nbsp; </b>Outstairs [ECM]<br />28&nbsp; <b><a href="http://chvrch.es/">Chvrches</a>&nbsp; </b>The Bones of What You Believe [Virgin]<br />29&nbsp; <b><a href="http://www.kiddiepunk.com/records.htm">Aspen Michael Taylor</a>&nbsp; </b>Middle of Nowhere (Deluxe Reverb Edition) [Kiddiepunk]<br />30&nbsp; <a href="http://www.prefabsproutalbum.com/" target="_blank"><strong>Prefab Sprout</strong></a>&nbsp; Crimson/Red [Icebreaker]<br /><br /><br /><br />The amount of new music coming in to my life has greatly diminished since I was last here. Even a top 30 albums list feels like pushing it when I only heard maybe 70-odd in total; not that long ago, I was routinely acquiring five or six hundred new albums in a year. I guess 'acquiring' is the word: most of those would only get listened to once or twice, and possibly skipped through at that, and the exercise came to feel like being an industrial fishing trawler rather than an enthusiastic amateur angler for previously unheard sounds. That's not to say I'm exactly happy with the new status quo -- good though it may have been for me to downscale, it was the closure of so many file-sharing sites, and, now, my ISP having blocked my access to most of the rest (I mean what the absolutely fuck is <em>that</em>?), that forced my hand. Most of the really good music blogs have gone as a consequence of these restrictive measures, so I'm simply being exposed to much less from week to week, and certainly far less by artists whose names aren't already known to me, which I think is a shame. I suppose I'm buying slightly more from legitimate outlets now, and I've certainly reverted to liking and wanting CDs, wanting packaging and sleeve art and liner notes, and I guess that's the desired effect -- and I'm glad if more musicians are able to earn a living (or part of one) as a result of the crackdown. But I do miss that bit of online culture where someone keeping a blog under a (usually incredibly fey) pseudonym could share with me their enthusiasm for&nbsp;some Norwegian lesbian alt.folk artist or scary Mexican drone-monger, and I could easily take a punt, and maybe end up falling equally in love with the same musician -- and, not uncommonly, <em>buy</em> their whole back catalogue as a result, as well as passing the message on in a forum like this. But, I can't deny that I've engaged more closely with what I've heard this year simply as a function of there being less of it, and I'm sure that's a good thing too.<br /><br />I don't think I'll say anything really at all about these thirty, except that discovering the work of Richard Dawson -- after a chance encounter with a single track from <i>The Glass Trunk </i>during a reproachably rare listen to Radio 3's generally brilliant 'Late Junction' <em>-- </em>is one of the most serendipitous things that have happened to me in the past year. His gig at <a href="http://www.cafeoto.co.uk/">Cafe OTO</a> in August, supporting Michael Chapman, was one of the very best things I've ever seen there: he is a totally captivating and, as far as I can tell, utterly unique performer, and his voice has cut through the murk of my year like an <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjaNzZt2olk&amp;feature=related">Atolla jellyfish</a> freaking out in the depths of the darkest oceans.<br /><br />Also: if you haven't made its acquaintance yet -- or even if you have: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uYs0gJD-LE">M.I.A.'s 'Bad Girls'</a> is just <i>astounding</i>.<br /><br />For all of which, perhaps my longest-abiding memory of musical awesomeness in 2013 will turn out to be the afternoon when I was rehearsing with Scottee downstairs at the Roundhouse while Atoms for Peace were soundchecking upstairs. Fuckity boy-oh-boy, did they mean business.<br /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">* * *</div><br /><br />And I think that's probably enough for a returning stab in the half-familiar dark.<br /><br />Almost inevitably, this first instalment of the new volume ends with an apology in doleful expectation that it might be a couple of weeks before I can get back here. I really can't get this blog up-and-running again in earnest until the book that I was supposed to write while you were sleeping has been delivered to its patient overlords. So I'm going to go and do that, mostly.<br /><br />In the meantime, thank you so much for coming back to me (or showing up for the first time, if you're new here); my best wishes for a happy, productive and -- oh, let's go for broke -- revolutionary 2014. ...Go on, go on, you know you want to. xx<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><iframe width="525" height="295" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/XIXk7PQGg_I" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> <br /><br />Chris Goodehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17993698000314709291noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28051672.post-30993423140456636422014-01-01T00:00:00.000+00:002014-01-01T00:34:33.244+00:00Hello again<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/C2UtPMYlcvg?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0' /></div><br /><br />Happy New Year... &amp; watch this space. (Hint: it won't be long, I'll be back later today. In the meantime, feel free to peruse all the lovely updated links and stuff.) xxChris Goodehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17993698000314709291noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28051672.post-39534798571749845492012-01-01T13:00:00.000+00:002012-01-01T13:00:03.587+00:00The Bank is now closed<br />Thank you for your custom.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="279" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/KNfHU748SYQ?rel=0" width="490"></iframe></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><br />The sidebar to the right will be updated with information regarding performances, publications and other escapades.<br /><br />To join the Chris Goode &amp; Company mailing list please <a href="mailto:mail@chrisgoodeonline.com">email</a> us.<br /><br />The Bank archives remain open for your perusal and comment.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Chris Goodehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17993698000314709291noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28051672.post-91011615937329950432011-12-30T16:08:00.000+00:002011-12-31T20:41:46.865+00:00Season's greeblings; and another year over<br />The trouble is, nothing is irrelevant.<br /><br />One of the things one learns from psychoanalytic therapy -- not that I've done a lot of it, or at least, not as much as some -- is that the casual aside, the throwaway remark, the odd scrap of detail, the glib wisecrack, these are where the real juice is. Even in this last post (proper), it seems I can't ignore the impulse to pounce on those tiny fragments that start off feeling barely purposive but end up containing the whole world.<br /><br />Perhaps it's a bit like <a href="http://www.bochicoine.com/?p=238">greebles</a> -- the textural patches of synthetic complexity that are applied to digitally rendered objects to make them more lifelike. Greebles are the most explicit manifestation yet of a paradox I've always enjoyed and been fascinated by, and used a great deal in my own work: they are a kind of noise, and, by extension, supposedly not-information -- and yet they're generative of a significant strand of associative meaning. Greebling has a close association with a lot of urban and electronic music from the early 90s onwards, when surface noise (such as samples of vinyl playback crackle) would be added to pristine digital tracks to lend them that most indicatively paradoxical feature: simulated authenticity. No doubt I've written here before about my own similar practice of 'scuffing': an extra pass or two over a staged sequence in order to make it <i>less</i> choreographically smooth -- taking the edge of unreality off by putting more edges on.<br /><br />So perhaps it's for that reason that I can't just <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oysoioL6ZmY">cheerily chuck</a> something in to the mix without also dismantling and analysing it. Today's example? Purely for the almost homeopathic dose of fun, the nano-shits and pico-giggles of it all, I thought I'd start this post with whatever was the most amusing or unusual or piquant version of 'My Way' that I could find on The You Tube. ("And now the end is here / And so I face the final curtain..." &amp;c.) A pale one-liner, in other words. But rewatching for the first time in ages the far-from-obscure Sid Vicious version from <i>The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle</i>, I found it really got under my skin. (In a good way.)<br /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="328" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/53TrZdXdfp8?rel=0" width="440"></iframe></div><br /><br />Notoriously, when the Vicious track -- plainly intended as an out-and-out cash cow novelty single, for all that the great Simon Jeffes graced it with his string arranging skills -- was recorded, Sid didn't know many of the lyrics, and improvised some incorrigible replacements during the session: famously, the third line becomes "You cunt, I'm not a queer", which hangs weirdly over the whole rendition, via its episodes of cat-killing and hat-wearing (a sardonic reference to Lydon, apparently), until its theme is recapitulated in unexpected inversion at the very end: "The record shows / I fucked a bloke / and did it my way." It's all pretty curious, and <i>exceedingly</i> queer in the present construction of that word, and perhaps what makes it so compelling, at least in the film version, is -- as even the song's godfather, Paul Anka, has suggested -- that Vicious seems sort of nakedly sincere. I guess beneath -- or actually <i>within</i> -- the strenuous pisstaking, Sid only reasserts the queer/punk credentials of the song itself: screw you all, <i>I did it my way.</i><br /><br />Revisiting the Sid Vicious version reminded me of a video project I conceived a few years ago in response to it. I hoped to rope in a bunch of unprepared volunteers who I'd film individually performing their own version of 'My Way', to a shop-bought karaoke backing, not supplying them with the correct lyrics but asking them to extemporise their own to fill in whatever lacunae there might be in their own remembrance of the song -- which I dare say might well include people who didn't really know it at all. I then intended to stack all these versions together: one backing track and a grid of maybe two dozen simultaneous performances, probably subtitled for ease of comparison. I thought that might be a fun project, and a revealing one. But it stayed on the drawing board: and anyway, apparently <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/07/world/asia/07karaoke.html">one ought to be a little wary</a> of inexpert karaoke renderings of this particular song...<br /><br />The reason I'm unpacking this a bit is because it's the best route in to describing how my working practice has changed in the past few years -- or, more importantly, how the commitments underscoring it have changed -- and why this blog is now a minor casualty of those otherwise highly positive changes. My never-realized video project is an early manifestation of what's gradually become the central motivation in my work: I mean my work as a director, above all, but more generally as a maker, which is what I increasingly would wish to call myself anyway -- an appellation that seems to contain within it all the strands of directing, writing, devising and performing that I do to differing degrees from project to project, and also to be plumped up by a sense that much if not most of the work is not about any of those roles or disciplines in particular but about a constant movement between them. That core commitment can be simply expressed (for once): I want to hear other people's voices. This is not to say that I am irrecuperably sick of the sound of my own, but rather that the peculiar textures of my work (and I think I was wanting precisely these textures right from the start, for example in undergraduate pieces that often employed multiple languages) are best served by the particular signal-to-noise ratio that's associated with polyvocality. What I want to do, in other words -- and what I want to do in order to be a distinctive artist in my own right and associated with certain kinds of aesthetic and political fingerprints -- is create spaces in which other voices than my own are heard. I might be in the mix too, at some level, but what really interests me is how my voice, my story, my testimony, lives among many, is always crosshatched and complicated by others. More and more my work is asking: what is an individual voice? What is a collective voice? And how is the imaginative and political life of the individual expressed and enhanced and extended by the collective, and how does the collective voice speak in the complex and partial distinction of the individual? How do we share our radical singleness with others, while harbouring our collectivity within ourselves ? (This is where Bataille's erotics first came in to my thinking to help save the day.) And where in all this is our own polyphony, the potentially liberating pressure of the contradictions we live, the dialectics that shape what we find to be liveable now and imaginable beyond us?<br /><br />A call has just gone out from West Yorkshire Playhouse, with whom Chris Goode &amp; Company will be making a piece from early next year. We're going to work with nine volunteers, most or all of whom we're expecting to be people with little or no performance experience; in collaboration with those individuals we'll make a short performance portrait for each of them to do on the stage of the Courtyard at WYP. It's one of a number of responses that have started to bubble up for me in the second half of this year to the incredible challenge that our earlier WYP piece, <i>Open House</i>, detonated beneath my practice. In that piece, the company (five of us) more-or-less lived for a week in a rehearsal room at the Playhouse, saying that we'd make a completely new piece from scratch in that week, and that the door would be (at least metaphorically) open so that anyone who wanted to could simply rock up and join in with the making. I remember with a little smirk now writing the copy in advance of that project, saying "Who knows, you might even end up in the final piece!", but feeling absolutely certain that nobody would engage to that extent. The retrospective smirk, of course, because the piece we showed on the Friday had a cast of 16. In that show, more than two thirds of the company were people we'd only met that week, and who were only there because they'd had the courage and the curiosity to show up in response to our invitation and say: Can I join in? And it was the most exciting week of the year, for me, artistically, and I left thinking, Well, now there needs to be a really good reason for not <i>always </i>working like that, because otherwise why would you not?<br /><br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-LdkaZRW-bao/TvxdFYyutqI/AAAAAAAADdU/gYjVDo2B3gw/s1600/Openhouse5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="266" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-LdkaZRW-bao/TvxdFYyutqI/AAAAAAAADdU/gYjVDo2B3gw/s400/Openhouse5.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Open House</i> at West Yorkshire Playhouse</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><br /><br />There has so far turned out to be only one dependable answer to that question, and it's this: the work that we showed on the last day of <i>Open House</i> was fun and exciting but also chaotic and inchoate and kind of a mess: which was perfect for that context, but it also made me want to be honest -- with myself, not least -- and say that I'd miss not being able to apply to that sort of collaborative framework the few bits and bobs that I know about crafting things, making them beautiful and elegant and (in a not too snooty way) refined. So the task since then has been to imagine different kinds of project that would allow for, if not compel, a reconciliation between, on the one hand, the openness of the system and the process and the room and the offer, and on the other, the (hopefully lightly-worn) authority of craft and a modicum of expertise born of the experience of fifteen years' back-to-back stuffmaking.<br /><br />So, last week, I was in Bradford with two old-hand collaborators, the brilliant and beautiful Wendy Hubbard and the beautiful and brilliant Jamie Wood, embarking on the process of making a new piece, <i>GOD/HEAD</i>, for Ovalhouse in February. And all of the questions kept looping round to that one. How can we make this piece as open, as polyvocal, as horizontally authored, as unpredictable as possible, while at the same time being able to take the audience on a shaped and crafted journey, and to see through the trajectory of a particular and quite nuanced argument? It's a fascinating question, a challenging one certainly, and, given the content of <i>GOD/HEAD</i>, and the ideas and issues it seeks to animate (more on which below), a thoroughly entangled and exhausting one. I came away from our three days at Theatre in the Mill feeling like I'd mostly been wrestling with bears. (Which in actual fact hardly happened at all. I did spend some time rough-housing with an excellent vegetable bhuna, but that's not quite the same thing.)<br /><br />Anyway: this, if we can crack it, and/or however else we find we can make models that square those particularly interesting and confounding circles, is what Chris Goode &amp; Co as a company venture will have at its heart. It's been very interesting feeling the existing threads and pulls in my work coming together to create a language that already feels (to me) both familiar in its aspirations and quite new in its comprehension of what those aspirations are and how they all feed in to each other. Many, many paragraphs in this blog over the past five years have fretted, either overtly or implicitly, about what felt like an unmanageably (and unhelpfully) various and uncohesive array of ongoing projects, and the tension of wanting to continue to make work in a very broad range of formats and contexts while at the same time feeling like the offer I made as an artist to the different audiences and stakeholders in that picture needed to be more cohesive. I needed to be able to tell that story. And now I think I can, or at least I can begin to. The thing about hearing other people's voices is absolutely central. Sometimes I might be the mouthpiece; sometimes other actors will lend their own voices to the task and sometimes they'll also be the originators of those messages as well as their interpreters; sometimes we'll hear strangers: maybe the audience, right there and then in the moment of our meeting, or maybe people from way outside the room, people we'll never meet and never really know but whose connection to us we might wish to consider together in an imaginative and focused way.<br /><br />These commitments feel like they might sit differently in the culture now than they did eighteen months ago, and perhaps in another eighteen months I'll be reframing them again, and that's fine, that's how it should be. For now there are two things that feel profoundly important. One is to keep remaking and rethinking theatre as a polyvocal space, a social space, a space that's scrupulously hospitable to difference but also in itself a place we can hold in common. The other is to refuse -- and to offer a welcoming alternative to -- what we seem to see more and more, all over, which is the <i>simulation </i>of participation: whether that's about theatre that presents itself as interactive but actually has no room within itself for a consequential or causative interactivity, or about the free-reign multivoice playgrounds of below-the-line territories in blogs, on news sites and so on, in which contributors are reduced to one-person mobs, bullies enraged by their own impotence and by the apparent impossibility of being part of a virtual discourse that can ever, ever amount to anything, or would even wish to.<br /><br />The kind of work that I'm now wanting to concentrate on making (not exclusively, but I do think there are interesting questions about how more standard text-driven models, or processes in which I might direct others' scripts say, might also respond to these ideas) certainly still includes a measure of solo performance -- <i>Keep Breathing</i>, for example, where I do most of the talking but quite a lot of what I'm saying has been written or spoken by others in advance of the performance and I've just gathered those other documents together; or <i>Hippo World Guest Book</i>, which it was lovely to give another outing on the Monday before Christmas, and which is nothing but a recital of other voices, in different degrees of legibility and personal&nbsp; sincerity. I'm not sure any solo performance can really work that doesn't begin and end in an acknowledgement and a respectiful enaction of the plurality of the "individual" voice.<br /><br />In those solo spaces, though, I feel much more like, say, the host of a dinner party, whose role is not to be the centre of attention, but perhaps merely, in a suggestive way, the centre of gravity, helping to set the tone and securing everyone's safety and their sense of being welcome, but other than that simply holding the space open for a fruitful exchange, a meaningful encounter, in which an audience sees itself, or themselves, or a perpetual reinscribing of those individual distinctions and speculative (or indicative) group formations reflected in terms of each other.<br /><br />I can't, though, quite, make the same case for this blog, and as I said in the post where I kind of handed in my notice, right now (and for the past few months, to be honest) I'm really not sufficiently interested in what <i>I</i>, personally and individually, think about things, except as a fuzzy interior monologue that keeps me company at all hours; nor am I very interested in making myself known to others through such statements. I'm at a place where I want a properly dialogic space, not a podium for my own grandstanding. Some blogs I guess can come close to that condition, but they're few, and they've always operated in that way.<br /><br />Actually the most fun I had on a blog all year was the <a href="http://queerdiy.blogspot.com/">Queer Eye Enquiry blog</a> I curated for LADA's DIY8. In each of those four weekly posts, I tried to trace an argument or proposition about queerness as a political lens, by pulling together texts and images and sound and video clips from a wide range of sources but not explicitly commenting on how all these elements might be seen to relate. In other words, there was a set of positions, opinions, commitments, framing my acts as a curator (as is always the case), but those became a jumping-off point for assembling some quite complex structures, and, crucially, any of the participants in the Queer Eye Enquiry workshop (and, now that the blog's gone public, anyone else who happens to drop by), might see completely different things in those assemblages, different contours and isobars, different narratives and rhythms: and in doing so, not only would they have <i>not</i> missed the point, but in an important way they'd have <i>got it</i>. It wasn't about <i>me</i>, it was about creating the conditions for there to be an <i>us</i>.<br /><br />This ties in so closely with what is for me (and I know for many others) among the most important commitments at the moment in relation to the theatre work: a disavowal of pedagogy as a top-down expression of authority or prestige based in knowledge. The space we now need -- as I know I've said before here, but this is the last chance I'll get to repeat myself! -- is not a space in which to tell audiences what they don't already know, but a constructed place in which it's possible for us all to acknowledge what we <i>do </i>already know, but have no space to admit, or recognize, or allow ourselves to feel in all its complexity. A space in which those things can be confronted truthfully and without fear, or more precisely without the suppression of fear. There's an awful lot that we're up against right now and a full acknowledgement of that is bound to give rise to fear, it probably <i>ought to</i>. But theatre -- and theatrical space (in which category I would also place the Queer DIY blog, for example) -- allows us to step into an experience of knowing what we know, and feeling what we must feel about what we know, without it immediately being threatening. Where we can just name the questions, without feeling that we have instantly to answer them or reject them or somehow defuse them. Whatever else it's been, and whatever its merits, this blog is not that kind of space, and never will be now: and as such, it feels to me, right now, irrelevant -- in the way that much poetry, for example, feels irrelevant, for all that it might be intelligent or penetrating or even useful in its way.<br /><br />I wonder how much this is a response to what I thought was the hardest part of a really hard year: the summer riots, in London and elsewhere (though of course my experience of them was very local, dauntingly so). I wrote a post at the time which actually ended up being the most read and discussed thing I've ever published here; I have a feeling it was sort of useful to some people in its way at the time, and I'm glad of that. I personally felt better for writing it, that's for sure. But it's also true that it did little more than underline a lot of feelings of doubt and confusion -- particularly in terms of what it might mean to be an artist, a theatre maker, in that moment. It felt as if what was happening in those few days was a surge of the energy that many of us as writers and makers had been trying to describe and feed into and even incite for months, years: but that when the irruption came, we were caught -- not napping exactly, but on the wrong foot. Suddenly, we were in the middle of events that, particularly in their immediate aftermath, badly needed the kind of constructed social spaces opened up in them that for a long time we've been hankering for, describing to ourselves, beginning to invent in our minds. And some artists did try to open up that kind of space, I know. But I felt powerless in that moment, and jarringly unready. I think partly that may have had to do with what, as I said in my piece at the time, was the most difficult part of the experience of those few awful days: hearing some terrible, disastrous, profoundly dismaying things said and expressed (especially on Twitter, which went nuts) by people I thought I was counting on as allies. There was the most atrocious reactionary lurch, fixing on a 'them' who were responsible, and insisting that it was <i>they</i> who were stupid for being so inarticulate in their apparently opportunistic rage, rather than it being <i>our</i> problem that we didn't know who our neighbours were and what they were expressing in a language -- a dialect, more like -- in which we had too little vocabulary to get by. I think I felt in those days that we were all letting each other down: those with whom I thought I was shoulder to shoulder but with whom I was suddenly locked in a shouting (or un-following) match from either side of a ravine; those who were out on the streets and whose loudly insistent 'no' should have been a call to more general action, but whose means and modes felt almost totally discontinuous from the kinds of anarcho-utopian fantasies (however rigorously imagined) and conceptual spaces that I and my comrades have been giving so much of our attention. That's not to say I think we're wrong to do that, nor did I even feel that from the outskirts of the thick of it at the time; and maybe the price we pay for the privilege of living as we do is that sometimes we will be blown away and, worse, baffled by the ways in which the day-to-day lived realities of social injustice and class relations can confound us and suddenly re-present us with the most glaring image of how necessary our work is and also, at that same moment, how impossible, or at least how unfit for purpose when stuff is literally on fire. Maybe all we can do is learn how to dance on the wrong foot, on the offbeat, the ungainly but insistent thump of anarchist syncopation.<br /><br />And, I must say, turning back, in that light, to the work that I've done since the summer, I do feel like it <i>can</i> do something that <i>is</i> about those riots. It maybe can't do it while everything is kicking off and awash with adrenalin and testosterone. It needs a place where people can let their fear go, and be quiet and thoughtful and kind to each other. (Not that there wasn't kindness in the midst of those riots -- and I don't just mean, in fact I don't at all mean, in the media-friendly clean-up operations that got most of us so speedily back to a cosmetically enhanced version of 'normal'.) The spaces that I've been making, and which I'll carry on making, are so much about who does and doesn't get heard. And yes, as it goes, my audience is overwhelmingly white and middle-class, by comparison with the streets I walk down to get the train every morning; but those whom we most need to be able to feel both the urgency and the feasibility of radical change are those overwhelmingly white middle-class folks who hold so much of the power and consequently carry (and experience, perhaps constantly, perhaps only in intermittent glimmering) the fear of that change, the dread of letting go.<br /><br />For my part, my year's been weirdly and very unexpectedly dominated by not dissimilar questions of transition and radical change. I've been reticent about discussing or even mentioning this, but now that I've embarked on making a piece about it it seems daft not to address it. The whole of my adult life I've basically been an atheist -- and some serious-minded spells of going to Quaker meetings, and the experience of engaging to some extent with the life of St Paul's Covent Garden while I was working there as a charity administrator ten years ago, didn't do much to dent that, though it made me basically respectful of those who do have some belief, especially those for whom that belief is complicated by thought and study and tempered by doubt rather than amplified by righteous certitude; and it also left me profoundly suspicious of the hectoring or sneering tendencies within atheism. I think partly I have always wanted to distinguish between the question of God and the practice of organized religion (though having seen behind the scenes, as it were, at St Paul's, I do think there's much that's admirable in the church as well as much, perhaps much more, that is deplorable). I've never consciously set out to dig down into these ideas in my work, except for a period in our collaborative work when Jonny Liron and I were thinking quite searchingly-- and not at all facetiously -- about the qualities of Jesus Christ as an actor or performer; but they've been in the air this year: in <i>Keep Breathing</i>, for example, where I've frequently ended up talking to interviewees about the religious faith or spiritual practices that are an ongoing part of their basic encounter with the world, especially in the experience of loss and bereavement; and then in <i>66 Books</i> for the Bush, my involvement in which required me to return (with some trepidation) to the King James Bible, for the first time since I studied it as an undergraduate in English literature. I've written <a href="http://theglobalherald.com/as-tumultous-to-a-non-believer-as-to-a-devout-christian-chris-goode-on-the-king-james-bible/25679/">here</a> about how turbulent I found that confrontation earlier in the year, but I didn't spell it out. Now, it's time to.<br /><br />One morning in April, while I was coming back from the supermarket, God spoke to me.<br /><br />When I say 'God', and of course when I say 'spoke', and in fact when I say almost every word in that sentence apart from 'supermarket', I'm reporting back from a hopelessly subjective experience, and from my immediate interpretation of it. What actually happened was an abrupt sequence of physical sensations, and the instantaneous location of the source of those sensations in some idea of God that I obviously still carry without ever really examining it very closely. And of course there was a huge emotional rush too, and I honestly don't know -- I've spent a lot of time trying to think through it -- in what order these things happened, the physical and the emotional and the (for want of a better word -- and I really <i>do</i> want a better word) spiritual. All I can honestly say is that a bunch of very intense stuff happened very quickly and at the point that it all happened I did not doubt for a moment that it was God. Not necessarily God intervening, in a pointy-finger lighting-bolt sort of way, but God being revealed as fundamentally present and as needing something from me: which is only to say, if there is a God, the God that became real to me in that strange sudden public orgasm of sensations so strong I had to put my shopping down and lean against a wall for steadiness, then the reality of that God immediately seemed to imply to me a whole raft of responsibilities to which I would surely have to face up.<br /><br />Once that rush was over, and I was back to picking up my shopping bags and heading home, albeit feeling physically shaken and panicky, the next sequence was of course a series of framing actions through which to try and reconcile the enormity of the experience with the need to continue to hold my life together in some recognizable version. One might question that need, but in that moment, I figured that was the task. I had a script to write, to an immovable deadline; this was <i>Keep Breathing</i>, which didn't feel too ungodly a project anyway: so I could park all this for a while and focus on the work and it wasn't like I was going out of my way to <i>refuse</i> the presence of God). I would put all this weird and potentially life-reconfiguring stuff to one side, and get on with my writing, and deal with the repercussions later.<br /><br />Only then of course I started to notice how similar in some senses my epiphany had been to my experience in my mid-20s of paranoid delusions, and the whole fabric of what happened to me became inevitably dubious. And just as I remember spending a whole day in 1999 looping between thinking that the entire surgery of my then GP was a stage-set replica filled with cult followers who were being instructed to stab me by the scrolling LED display in the waiting room, and then thinking that that was obviously preposterous nonsense, and then thinking that it wasn't <i>all </i>obviously preposterous, and so on round in <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBfNn-yA1G0">ever decreasing circles</a>, so I spent several days this spring lurching between different degrees of acceptance and resistance, between dismissal and the brink of submission. I couldn't get past an uncloseable hypothetical chink: if there really <i>were </i>a God whose presence was the very definition of an article of faith to so many people, how else should it feel than exactly how it had felt? What more did I want, to quash my doubt? Perhaps in a way I was thinking about my recent distrust of the medicalization of sadness, the idea that being very unhappy within a social and cultural system that couldn't deal with unhappiness has produced a treatable condition called depression which makes some large industrial-pharmaceutical companies very rich. Did my God experience really have to be medicalized into a neurochemical incident, an episode with a clear (and rational) psychopharmacological cause? And then again, what was it exactly that made me want to kick against that? Why, after a fleeting encounter with something that felt like God, should I want to cling to it against almost all rational evidence to the contrary?<br /><br />What gradually <i>did</i> become clear was that the time was never going to be right for me to 'deal with' these questions in the normal run of my day-to-day life. Theatre, in the end, is what I think with. And so when Ovalhouse asked me in for a chat, to see if there might be anything I'd like to make with them, these questions were still at the top of my mind. (And they also seemed to sit very interestingly and productively alongside the artistic questions that felt most urgent at that time, the ones I describe above which arose out of <i>Open House</i> and the will to reduce the tension between craft and not-knowing, between the object and the event.) And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how I come to be making <i>GOD/HEAD</i>. Had we got the Wellcome Trust funding we applied for (they knocked us back for fear that the emergent piece was too "spiritual" -- their scare quotes, but I don't disagree with them exactly), it would have been a piece with a strong focus on this question around how neuroscience and religion (or more precisely the experience of God, which I keep wanting to maintain is quite a different thing) can play nicely together, or not, and whether God is just a squirt of chemicals, an accidental titillation of 5-HT receptors, and what changes if that's so. Without that funding and the particular perspective it would have compelled, it's easier to concentrate on the bit that fascinates me more, which is approaching a relatively familiar trope -- the crisis of faith -- from its much less familiar flipside: not the once-confident man of God who begins to struggle to sustain his belief, but the complacent atheist who is suddenly made to rethink everything, and how the universe shifts in relation to that rethinking and the fifteen seconds of intense physical and emotional overload that triggered it in the first place. Why am I, a previously comfortable atheist and committed materialist, so reluctant simply to give up the idea of the presence of God when the only sensible considered view is that for cultural reasons I have brought a deeply embedded superstitious complex to bear on my interpretation of a briefly disorienting moment of neurotransmitter naughtiness?<br /><br />I suppose in a way what I trust -- and I think this comes through in quite a lot of my work, and a lot of my experience of the world -- has to do with the 'My Way' questions I outlined near the top of this post, about how we as individuals deal with our most personal experiences, in such a way as to be able to share them with others rather than struggle with them alone. A lot of the conversation in Bradford was about privacy. I don't reject privacy but I think it is a default for us in ways that are (by now) wholly ideological and utterly inseparable from the capitalist lodestone of private ownership -- itself a superstition easily as suspect as what Richard Dawkins calls the 'God delusion'. Making things -- not necessarily, but not least, in an artistic context -- is for me always a way of destroying, or at least suspending, a privacy that I think places too much of us -- certainly too much of me for my comfort -- out of the sight and out of the mind of others, and keeps those others (and our responsibilities towards them) too hidden from us. Of course the question immediately becomes one of that same signal-to-noise ratio I invoked at the very start: how can we find a way of conveying, sharing, analysing <i>together</i> our experiences, in a way that is as faithful as possible to the distinction of our experience? How do we do that as writers, say, when not only do many of our most intense and enlivened experiences evade the capacity of language fully to grasp them, but more than that, they have those qualities of intensity and excess partly <i>because</i> language cannot reach them? This is a very good answer, I suppose, at least, as to why I'm not <i>only</i> a writer, and why I had to venture beyond being "a playwright" in order to get done the work that seemed most necessary. I suspect it's also why I keep trying to push at what what theatre can do with sex, and with the emotional and psychic experiences of desire and grief and physical pain, and with the haecceity of the naked body (and, increasingly, the body of the animal); and maybe ultimately it's why I'm still a modernist, and my principal interest is in form rather than content, albeit suffused (perhaps sentimentally) with a close acknowledgement of the depth of the will to gesture rather than the semiology just below the surface, which is, for me, close to greebling.<br /><br />But I feel like I'm writing my own obituary, which was not the point of all this... Er, what was the point of all this again? Oh, I guess a sort of year's end (and blog's end) state-0f-the-nation address or Queen's speech or something.<br /><br />Well, darlings, all things considered it's been a really good year, really productive, frequently really difficult, and full of intensity: and probably if I could describe my perfect year it would be a mix of all those things in roughly the balance I got them: so, I guess that's a nice thing to be able to say, even if I do feel like I'm nursing a bruise or two over Christmas. The decisive factor, in so many ways, has been the new (or newly formalised) partnership with my extraordinary producer Ric Watts; as well as being quietly brilliant at what he does, Ric is a thoroughly good guy in a pretty wicked bit of the world, and I've been appreciating very much the unaccustomed pleasure of having my work represented by someone who not only instinctively gets it, but who has also taken the trouble to engage with it closely and is building a really dimensionalised sense of it and of me as an artist. It's the carefulness and energy of Ric's attention, as well as a bum of a lot of hard work, that have made it possible for us to line up what looks like a fun year ahead.<br /><br />CG&amp;Co started this year in the spring with an R&amp;D project supported by CPT, picking up the threads of a devised piece based on the writings of Blaise Cendrars which I'd started looking into a few years ago at New Greenham Arts; in three weeks we made a 25-minute trailer for a show called <i>The End of the World Filmed by the Angel of Notre-Dame </i>that I think I'm resigned to us probably never making, or at least not for a while (it's incredibly hard to see where else it can fit other than the international festival circuit, which is not quite where we're at yet) -- but the collaboration with Mervyn Millar's gorgeous live animation and the sharp, bold performances of Clive Mendus (as God, a role he was manifestly born to play), Gemma Brockis and Jamie Wood made for a really lovely working atmosphere and a vivid and sort of pungent piece of work which I was proud of and, more importantly, surprised by. And I got to squirt honey-scented shampoo up the wall from a kitchen syringe, in a momentary eruption that (as far as I can tell) absolutely nobody noticed, and which took an hour with some kitchen roll to clear up. That's the sort of moment that my theatre work lives and dies by, if anybody asks.<br /><br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-2nYXQVhp04k/Tvxlg_UUO1I/AAAAAAAADdg/Mwx6vQhcKgs/s1600/God+the+Father+bw+small.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="272" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-2nYXQVhp04k/Tvxlg_UUO1I/AAAAAAAADdg/Mwx6vQhcKgs/s400/God+the+Father+bw+small.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Clive Mendus in rehearsal for <i>The End Of The World...</i></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><br />From there we went straight into an R&amp;D week at the NT Studio, beginning a process that hopefully will bear fruit this summer (if we can make the logistics work), on a verbatim piece that I'm hugely excited about. It was a pretty joyful week, not least because I got to work for the first time with two actors I hugely admire, Stephen Boxer (a great and underrated presenter of children's tv back when I was a children) and the lovely Angela Clerkin. And that took us straight into <i>Open House</i> for WYP, which, as I've already said, was a real game-changer for me, and at several points the happiest I've been on the inside of my work in ages.<br /><br />Jumping from <i>Open House </i>more or less straight into the making of a prototype of <i>Where We Meet</i> was a really happy transition, carrying across (I hope) some of the openness of the Leeds project but also working at a level of aesthetic detail and intellectual and compositional precision that felt like a really neat and appealing corrective to some of the mad jamming of the <i>Open House </i>week. Again, I'm not sure that <i>Where We Meet </i>has any future life, for similar reasons to the Cendrars piece: it's not that the idea isn't excitingly fertile, it's just hard to see how to make it viable, given that it's a show with a cast of four, for an audience of two, that could only reasonably be performed once in an evening. There's no way that's <i>anyone's </i>idea of "public benefit"... But I was so moved by the care and the application of the four performers, Lucy Ellinson, Jonny Liron, Theron Schmidt and Tomas Weber -- grateful for their tremendous skill and generosity (and not least their willingness to get naked and <i>stay </i>naked) -- and by the many kind folks who lent us their homes to rehearse in; and above all, perhaps, hugely touched by the ten people who came to see the scratch performances in Edinburgh, almost all of whom stayed behind afterwards, sometimes for longer than the duration of the show itself, to have tea and talk about the work, what they'd seen in it, what they'd felt, what they thought could be pursued further. There was something about those post-show conversations -- which, I guess, had after all been conceived as part of the work rather than an adjunct to it -- that felt even more exemplary than the pieces themselves. Being ready to sit with and be part of those conversations took great generosity on the part of the actors too and more than once I just sat there and allowed my mind to be gently blown by the four of them: Lucy, who's been my fellow traveller on so many projects over the past six years, and who was <i>just about</i> holding it together under the incredible physical and emotional strain of commuting between Edinburgh and Newcastle (where she was rehearsing a show for Northern Stage) <i>and</i> making work for Forest Fringe, as well as occupying perhaps the most intense of the four roles in <i>Where We Meet</i> with great intrepidity -- including a hitherto undiscovered (by me, at least) talent for improvising stream-of-consciousness text bordering sometimes on glossolalia -- and a gorgeous (and crucial) whack of self-deprecating physical comedy; Tomas, by some way the least experienced performer of the four, and the only one I hadn't worked with before, but who gave himself to the work with great grace and diligence; Jonny, whose unique and idiosyncratic expertise and whose wild signature wholeheartedness and companionship and courage and beauty are what makes it possible for me to think of making these unlikely shows in the first place; and perhaps most hearteningly for me, Theron, given the ups and downs that this blog has charted over the years in our working relationship: coming back together after three years for <i>Open House</i> was thrilling but difficult (I think we'd both say), but, for me at least, <i>Where We Meet</i> was the perfect place for us to, er, meet again, with none of the complicated and dissonant pressures that made the temporary end of our association in 2008 so painful and so impossible to avoid. Theron is just simply an exceptionally good person to have in the room: kind and funny and caring but also fiercely rigorous and always ready to ask the right question, even (or especially) when it's a question that no one feels ready to answer. I'm intending the year feeling really really thankful that that's a working relationship that's come back into my life in such a strong and expansive way.<br /><br />Edinburgh was actually, mostly, of course, about the downscaled revival of <i>The Adventures of Wound Man and Shirley</i> -- and much kudos to Ric for talking me into doing those ten shows at the Pleasance, as, reluctant though I was, I think they've been incredibly helpful in establishing CG&amp;Co as an idea with its own distinctive tone. Of course I worry that <i>Wound Man and Shirley</i> is a misleading calling card -- not everything I do is so out-and-out accessible, and the fictional storytelling thing is a fairly small part of my repertoire and an even smaller part of my plans for the future; there are storytelling elements in <i>GOD/HEAD</i>, for example, but anybody expecting it to feel like <i>Wound Man </i>is likely to have a bit of a problem with it. Nonetheless, it's opened up some lovely new conversations (as has the subsquent BAC run), and I'm thrilled to have had heroes like Daniel Kitson and Stewart Lee come to see it, and if it's done anything to help some key people in the sector see that (a) I don't make the weird stuff I sometimes make because I don't know how to write a good crafted story, and (b) I don't only make irrecuperably weird and intransigently highbrow stuff anyway, then that's great, not just in terms of that show being seen but with regard to the plans that CG&amp;Co might be able to make in the future. Everything that supports the sense that I have any kind of sustainable future at all is still quite a relief!<br /><br />CG&amp;Co also had its name on <i>Keep Breathing</i>, though strictly speaking the project predated the existence of the company. It had a first outing at STK in April under the aegis of London Word Festival, and that was a very lovely occasion, massively enhanced by LWF's having double-billed it with Debbie Pearson's utterly radiant (and wonderfully sympathetic) <i>Like You Were Before</i>. The Plymouth run was a mixed time for me -- everyone at the Theatre Royal was terrific as ever, and I was thrilled (as audiences were too) with the transformation that Naomi Dawson and Kristina Hjelm were able to effect in the Drum, finding in it a much more embracing, immersive space than I'd seen it be before. Audience response to the piece was as good as I could possibly have hoped -- I've never had so many people write to me after a show to share their own experiences, often very movingly. (To be fair, I've never so explicitly solicited those responses: that seems to be a good thing to do.) Only in one or two performances did I feel like I was failing to make the kind of connection on which the whole piece completely depended -- and then it was horrible. But the audience-facing stuff was basically great. I was also really pleased to meet as part of that project Sarah Elvin, who generously spoke to me at length about the campaign, in which she's been deeply involved, to try and put a stop to the building of <a href="http://www.iiw.org.uk/">a waste incinerator at Devonport</a>; it felt important as well as personally satisfying to be able to highlight a local issue like that as part of the show. Sadly the last couple of days have brought the news that the project is going ahead despite the strength of local objection (and the admission by the council that those objections are fully justified by the available evidence; the only argument in favour, by their own admission, is that there is money to be made, and this of course overrules even the consideration of health risks to local residents); I hope the campaign will be able to find the resources it needs to keep going, but whatever happens, I was really inspired by Sarah and I hope others were too when I passed on her story. So all of that was good; frustratingly, I had a very difficult time personally in Plymouth, running into a brick wall of depression that threatened a few times to tip over into something seriously uncontainable -- and being on my own there (and so far from home) made it very hard to find the support I needed: so, sadly, I'm still looking back on that whole experience with more of a shudder than a glow. The learnings -- that I'm still vulnerable to a species of depression that hasn't disrupted my life that significantly since 2002 and which I'd begun to think was all in the past; and that I shouldn't ever again let myself get into a position where I'm on tour and totally on my own without anyone having an eye on me -- will hopefully be valuable enough in themselves that eventually I'll feel less sore about those few weeks.<br /><br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-OJY2wtiouAc/TvxpW98vjBI/AAAAAAAADd4/1ZgChxSpTr4/s1600/Keep+Breathing+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="267" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-OJY2wtiouAc/TvxpW98vjBI/AAAAAAAADd4/1ZgChxSpTr4/s400/Keep+Breathing+2.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Keep Breathing</i> at the Drum, Plymouth</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><br />And then the Monday before Christmas I did <i>Hippo World Guest Book</i> at STK, getting it out of storage for the first time since my <a href="http://www.leanupstream.info/"><i>Lean Upstream</i></a> mini-retrospective in 2009: and it was the most fun I've ever had performing that piece (due to a brilliant audience -- just the right combination of smart and drunk -- and the perfect venue, notwithstanding it was so cold in there that I could see my breath in front of my face). I don't know if <i>HWGB</i> has a future -- I really like doing it, at least in front of audiences who are able to tune in to what I'm doing, and it's pretty easy to install and to take on the road; on the other hand, the passage of time has a big effect on how the piece comes across (to my mind, anyway) -- I think our sense of what online community formation and exchange actually means has shifted a lot in the nearly five years since the piece was made, and I certainly find that overfamiliarity has made the below-the-line abuses and snarkery less gleefully amusing than they were at the time. But I guess the piece will be part of CG&amp;Co's portfolio -- the one-off performance at STK was mostly in order to show it to Ric so that he knows what it is and does and where it might sit -- and on the whole I'm quite glad of that. Glad too of the support of STK and especially the mighty Greg McLaren.<br /><br />And then I guess there were all the things that <i>weren't</i> CG&amp;Co projects. Back at the start of the year, the Pinter double-bill, <i>Landscape / Monologue</i>, at the Ustinov, which gave me the opportunity of working with three phenomenal actors I've long admired: Maggie Henderson again (after her heartbreaking Ann in <i>King Pelican</i>), George Irving (who's been on my wishlist ever since I saw him in an emotionally scarring episode of <i>Juliet Bravo</i> when I was ten!), and Clive Mendus (who was in the cast of <i>The Street of Crocodiles</i>, the Complicite show which the Thompson's calendar takes as Year Zero); that project was intended partly to flag up to the world that I'm really keen to direct other people's work, and I'm not sure it achieved that objective: but on its own terms I was very proud of it, and not least the extraordinary lighting cadenza which Katharine Williams so beautifully created for the transition between the two plays. And I went straight from Bath to Los Angeles (as one does) for the last leg of <i>The Author</i> -- which I think I've covered in sufficient depth, but which I look back on with a shake of the head at our (and above all at Tim Crouch's) audacity -- in a good way, mostly; the launch of Tim's <a href="http://oberonbooks.com/index.php/default/crouch-plays-one.html?SID=iho0o6su6tvelqgcj3hhcmhb42"><i>Plays One </i>from Oberon</a> and the new <i>Contemporary Theatre Review </i>number dedicated to his work a couple of weeks ago was a terrific vantage from which to ponder the whole <i>Author</i> journey, and I'm pleased to report that I have even less idea what to make of it all now than I ever did. Probably that goes especially for that last Los Angeles leg -- as it probably should. But I'm remembering chatting about Ken Campbell with the brilliant <a href="http://www.staciechaiken.com/">Stacie Chaiken</a> over the best grilled cheese sandwich I've ever tasted, and catching a glimpse of dolphins as we beetled down the coast road towards Santa Barbara, and nearly dying in Vic Llewellyn's passenger seat as we headed home one night, and being courted by the senior vice president of casting at Sony who thought I should be in sitcoms (the eccentric British next door neighbour kind of thing), and eating recherche flavours of Ben &amp; Jerry's while watching <i>RuPaul's Drag Race </i>back at the apartment, and... well, there's much there to feel fondly about.<br /><br />Then there were my adventures in being a proper writer -- <i>The Extremists </i>for the Royal Court and <i>The Loss of All Things</i> for the Bush as part of their extraordinary <i>66 Books</i>. What do we make of all that, on reflection? I'm not quite sure, to be honest. I was very pleased with, and a little startled by, both pieces; neither is perfect but both are, I think, interesting and provocative and ambitious. That the Royal Court ended up not wanting <i>The Extremists </i>after what felt like a really ecstatically successful public reading in March has inevitably slightly distorted my relationship with it, but I think I mostly feel as I did at the time that the breakdown of that project was more to do with a mismatch of expectations around process than a direct reflection on the script; it didn't go forward because they felt it didn't quite work yet, and the frustrating thing is, I agreed that it didn't -- but it seems they wanted me to fix those problems by continuing to work on the piece as a lonely playwright in a little room, while I felt that only a rehearsal process would iron those wrinkles out, while further time alone in my writer's cell would only produce rewrites of increasingly antisocial weirdness. The Bush's attitude likewise was initially wary -- encouraging to a degree but anxious about where my half-hour piece ended up, and wanting me to consider cutting the whole last scene (which still seems to me to be an extraordinary thing to say to a writer, at least to one you profess to have any faith in or respect for); perhaps that bit of the conversation would have felt more supportive and less censorious had we been able to have it in detail rather than as one discussion alongside 65 others that they were attempting to have at the same time. At any rate, once the finished script had been signed off, I have to say the Bush were both consistently supportive and extraordinarily impressive -- especially Tamara Harvey, who drove the extremely condensed get-in/tech rehearsals for both my pieces (I was also directing Harold Finley in Michael Rosen's piece from Amos) with tremendous facility and lightness. I'm not sure many of the grown-ups really liked or felt attuned with <i>The Loss of All Things</i> (though Josie Rourke was nice about it once she'd seen it a few times and its movements became a little clearer to her), but it got good mentions in dispatches and seems to have excited some of the younger directors and writers around the project: thanks not least to the gobsmacking work of my three actors: Christian Roe, who I first met at the NT Studio a couple of years ago and who's loomed large this year one way and another, which is a delightful turn; Rick Warden, who was something of an idol when I was in the year below him at Cambridge and watching him turn out performances of such astounding intensity and daring that it's taken me until now to pluck up the courage to ask him if we could work together -- he was amazing (not least in the way he dealt with becoming a father for the second time on the day of our tech <i>for heaven's sake</i>) and I hope we'll go round that particular block again before too long; and Gareth Kieran Jones, the perfect Paul, to whom I was introduced quite by chance on the train home from Edinburgh and who stuck in my mind straight away as someone with exactly the right combination of hard edges and soft centre (and frankly blaring sexual charisma), and whom I'd love to get in a room with again very soon. Maybe even a rehearsal room, ha ha. If there's one thing <i>66 Books</i> brought home to me with great clarity, it's that what we call "new writing" is actually a very particular and rather a narrow sort of thing, and to that extent rather a peculiar territory. I don't dislike it -- in fact I'd love to be spending more time there, especially at the incredibly dynamic new Bush space, and conceivably in a post-Dominic Cooke Royal Court too -- but I can understand why they think I'm as weird as I sort of think they are... ;)<br /><br />And then there was the huge fun and fascination of the <i>Queer Eye Enquiry </i>DIY project, which ate much more of the autumn than I intended it to (or than it paid for) but was a brilliantly heartening experience, not least because in assembling those big blog posts and the pieces of correspondence that accompanied them I realised I was telling a huge story back to myself, a kind of mind-map (plus heart-map plus -- <i>sorry, but</i> -- cock-map) of a huge region of the artistic universe in which I've worked over the past fifteen years and slowly put together my own creative and political identity; if they still did <i>This Is Your Life</i>, my Big Red Book would have looked a lot like that blog. And I was thrilled to see what the participating artists did, and made, and thought, in response to that stimulus; and it reminded me of how much I want to continue to find space for a curatorial practice as part of what I do both within and outside CG&amp;Co. I suppose that impulse to curation was also driving <a href="http://www.ganzfeldpress.com/"><i>Better Than Language</i></a>, the poetry anthology I edited and which came out this year through my own <a href="http://www.ganzfeldpress.com/">Ganzfeld</a> imprint. I was ever so proud of the book (which I have to say represented a <i>lot</i> of voluntary labour), and of everyone in it, and the two launch events (at STK and as part of Hi Zero in Brighton) were lively and memorable, and there's been a very small amount of positive critical response (compared with, to the best of my knowledge, next to no negative critical response), and I'm only a little sorry that we've sold rather fewer copies than I expected. But they continue to trickle out so maybe it's just a slow-burner.<br /><br />And now we're down to the sundries but I do want to say how much I liked having a couple of extended public conversations this year: with Chris Johnston as part of <i>The Argument Room </i>at QMUL (you can still watch the archived stream <a href="http://www.livestream.com/theargumentroom/video?clipId=pla_56a63c90-fd2b-4867-bc9d-af9b2376e8bb">here</a>) and with Theron Schmidt at the excellent <a href="http://flashconference.co.uk/">Edgelands</a> conference in Edinburgh. It seems to me there's finally a bit of a turn against what was becoming an entrenched soundbite-driven culture in theatre and allied trades: an underachieving reductiveness which is certainly not vanquished but is at least beginning to look like one option among many, and one driven by ideological rather than economic constraints. There was an admirable thoughtfulness in evidence at the D&amp;D on queer theatre that I hosted for Improbable; and at a small gathering of theatre-making friends in Lancaster in the summer (an assemblage much enhanced by the contributions of those who couldn't make it in person but had given a lot of thought to how they might be able to be present anyway: a nice synthesis of face-to-face and virtual mind-to-mind); and at the Birkbeck seminar on provisional poetic communities that Carol Watts organized for the visiting cris cheek (whom I had a lot of fun <a href="http://beescope.blogspot.com/2011/08/why-dont-we-just-do-it-with-our-voices.html">talking to in the run-up</a>); and in the one-off classes I taught at CSSD and RHUL. Even on Twitter, there was thoughtfulness, often. Not always, but often.<br /><br />Add to all of the above the readings that I did at the Other Room in Manchester (half-cocked but quite enjoyable) and the Situation Room in London (ditto, probably); the video I made for <a href="http://beescope.blogspot.com/2011/04/kenilworth-castle-760-sham-wedding.html">'Kenilworth Castle...'</a>, in response to zero public demand and garnering even less interest; a couple of new poems, both exactly half-decent, and a piece called <a href="http://beescope.blogspot.com/2011/08/strive-for-perfection-in-hope-of.html">'Divine Principles in the End Times'</a> <i>i.m. </i>Antonio Urdiales which was probably the only worthwhile piece of standalone experimental writing I did this year; and the various little scraps of journalism and online interviews and radio stuff that all these foregoing projects have thrown up (with all the fullest redolences of the phrase "thrown up"); and this blog, of course, in so far as it's held anything like it's own this year (which to be fair I think it has, intermittently): it feels like a satisfyingly full year, crammed with good conversations and the beginnings of lots of things I can look forward to. I'm pretty sad that there's been so little room for Action one19, my ongoing collaborative partnership with Jonny Liron, which was such an important thread running through previous years: we started the year with great plans, and in fact made some good things happen on a couple of occasions, but mostly circumstances and perhaps the passage of time have worked against us. I hope we can find a way of protecting our work together, and the relationship that has produced that work, in the coming year: as far as I'm concerned, we've only just begun, and I'd be really sad to think we couldn't make the space for that work to continue. (I also can't help wondering whether the intensity of that work hasn't up till now been what's kept God at bay -- which is certainly how I'd rather it was.) But I think that's the only real downside to the year that's gone. Which is not a bad state of affairs, all told.<br /><br />And now, the end is not only near but pretty much here: and so before I face the final curtain -- or, rather, lower the Bank's security shutters and steal away -- I figured I'd leave you with a survey of some of the excellent things that have happened this year that I (mostly) <i>wasn't</i> involved in. Quite a lot of these things are internetly flotsams and bobtails which you'll probably know by heart already, especially if you follow me on Twitter. But there'll be some brief accounts of things that <i>actually</i> happened in the <i>actual</i> world, too: for, ah, I am of that generation, poor soul. I'll be tossing in a few interludes too, to break up the monotony of my going on about cool things and trying to find words other than "brilliant" and "wonderful" with which to encapsulate their, er, brilliance and wonderfulness. -- All right, well, off we go. You might want a cup of tea and a biscuit. (Don't worry, you won't have to put up with this sort of micromanaging much longer.) I should add that these are in <i>Strictly Come Banking-</i>style no particular order; and also that some of what follows may be considered NSFW, if you're unlucky enough to W with Cs. (Though what are you doing at W anyway? It's holidays innit!)<br /><br /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">* * * </div><br /><br /><br /><b>1&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </b>To begin with: this. Because: everything.<br /><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="310" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/G7RgN9ijwE4?rel=0" width="410"></iframe></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><br /><b>2</b>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; I'm going to name as my Writer of the Year (do these ridiculous non-prizes really merit capital letters? I can't tell yet...) the quite remarkable <b>Chris Kraus</b>. Although I vaguely knew Kraus from her editorial work with Semiotext(e), and especially the hit-and-miss but reliably place-holding compendium <i>Hatred of Capitalism</i>, I'd never made a sustained engagement with her own writing until this year. Kraus's <i>Where Art Belongs</i>, a little orange volume in Semiotext(e)'s 'Intervention' series, and an elatingly appealing book to look at and to hold, didn't immediately seem likely to be the beginning of a full-on crush: it was at first glance modest, conversational, an easy read between tube stops. But gradually and without a single misstep the book builds into an exceptionally high-resolution picture of what art now is in our culture, and through which circuits it travels. The writing is grounded in a candid, almost flirtatious subjectivity, tellingly feeding off the complex privileges of proximity and the intimate vantage: which is to say it is a book just as much about where <i>criticism</i> belongs, and what kind of a participant in the dissemination of aesthetic and political ideas a "professional" critic might now be. The pieces on the Tiny Creatures gallery project and on the fascinating and infuriating <a href="http://www.bernadettecorporation.com/">Bernadette Corporation</a> were particularly invigorating to me, but it was the relief map of Kraus herself that the book slowly yields that sent me scuttling across to her novel <i>I Love Dick</i>, which I was aware of on its first release in 1997 but which I've only now read, in the light of <i>Where Art Belongs</i>, and which is gobstoppingly thrilling in the risks it takes with disclosure and specificity and the game of the self -- a game which fifteen years later seems both reckless and underachieving, but which also contains within itself the seeds of a more continuously radical and pertinent engagement with the core question that fiction and critical theory hold in common: what else can we be? An absolute delight, and, better yet, a daunting one.<br /><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-TMASSDlIe-U/Tvi9p9c3KpI/AAAAAAAADcM/PFSKWFHriyM/s1600/whereartbelongs.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-TMASSDlIe-U/Tvi9p9c3KpI/AAAAAAAADcM/PFSKWFHriyM/s400/whereartbelongs.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><br /><br /><b>3</b>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; It feels as though it might somehow be indicative of a particular kind of importance if you can spend only a few fleeting moments with an artist's work, and still come away from the encounter feeling bowled over yet again by what you thought you already knew and had comes to terms with about that artist's project. It will be absolutely no surprise to any longterm reader of this blog, or anyone who knows me personally, that <a href="http://ryanmcginley.com/"><b>Ryan McGinley</b></a>'s end of year show at Alison Jacques, <i>Wandering Comma</i>, took my legs out from under me. McGinley's made a lot of terrific work since he was last in town, at the same gallery in 2009 with his stunning <i>Moonmilk</i> show: in particular, a large number of unexpected but consistently superb monochrome studio portraits, including several which place his familiar nude young pals in the frame with a bird or animal -- partly, he says, a tactic for helping his models take their attention off the camera, or off the camera's attention on them, though I also read in that conjunction something more profound that comes through <i>Wandering Comma</i> in teeming abundance. That imposing something is McGinley's courageous and crucial confrontation with the idea of the sublime -- an idea that in itself feels vulnerable now that the familiar downscaling reconfigurations of the sublime under postmodernism are so stressed-out and frankly incredible. Here, McGinley gives us back a version of the old-skool Kantian sublime partly through working with scale: there are only seven pictures here but each is not far off 3m x 2m: in other words, about as big as it gets for photographs. In all but one of the pictures, the human figure is present as our yardstick, and in some nature diminutizes the person -- perhaps most tellingly in 'Taylor (Rushing River)', a yelping head and leg (like Bruegel's Icarus) sticking out of a body of water so turbulently foamy it almost looks like the fuzz of a giant <i>Sesame Street </i>monster; while in the two black-and-white portraits that initially greet the visitor, the female body itself is huge, in a way that recalls the commercial exploitation of undressed women on every Western billboard but somehow manages to spirit away the distortions of the advertising transaction to present us with very large collaborative compositions: women who are seeing themselves being seen, and who see us seeing, in standing room only behind McGinley's shoulder. Perhaps the key to the whole show is the gorgeously coloured 'Night Sky Pine', which eliminates the human altogether (except the implied viewer, of whom this is the tenderest portrait) and seems almost single-handedly to re-present us with a natural sublime we might have thought was lost forever -- towering trees, distant stars, and the difficult poetry of our own looking-up; these pictures, unabashedly, are out-and-out fictions, but like all the best fictions they are to be trusted, and loved for their trustworthiness. I find the erotic kick of McGinley's best work still deeply present, and it's exciting to see it as much in the pine trees as in the naked bodies. For me, the show's pinnacle, perhaps McGinley's most important piece so far, is 'Brandee (Midnight Flight)', in which the manifestly literal and the reverberantly metaphorical are locked in deep conversation: the falling motif which McGinley's been exploring for some time now, but also the depiction of wonder at what is fallen <i>through</i>, at where that flight begins and ends, feels as complete and as extensive as any single visual presentation could ever hope to be at this time and in these places. Dizzying and yet emphatically steady, McGinley's is, to my racing mind, the fullest and most richly participatory artwork currently being shown. <br /><br /><br /><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-EIzSHhE3YGA/Tvee5noUOpI/AAAAAAAADbo/_YAq-49hKpQ/s1600/Brandee_%2528Midnight_Flight%2529_2011_72x108.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="266" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-EIzSHhE3YGA/Tvee5noUOpI/AAAAAAAADbo/_YAq-49hKpQ/s400/Brandee_%2528Midnight_Flight%2529_2011_72x108.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ryan McGinley, 'Brandee (Midnight Flight)' (2011)</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><br /><br /><br /><b>4</b>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; If there's one thing I like more than smart cool people, it's cool smart people. Not necessarily theatre people, but people who are thinking elegantly -- and in ways that can shine helpful lights on theatre practice -- about how we live together. This is probably where I'd mention Ken Robinson's <a href="http://www.theschooloflife.com/Sermons/Ken-Robinson-on-Education">School of Life sermon on passion</a>, if I hadn't already <a href="http://beescope.blogspot.com/2011/07/finger-and-moon.html">made a fuss of it back in July</a>. I've also been really struck this year by the amazing <a href="http://transitionculture.org/">Rob Hopkins</a>; if you don't know his <a href="http://transitionculture.org/">Transition Culture</a> blog, bookmark it now and check it hourly. I really do think transition communities are going to be among the most vital sources of learning and insight for theatre and performance makers over the next few years: they're already grappling with what it means to imagine living differently, in a really hands-on way, while a lot of more overtly politically oriented groups are still alphabetizing the doilies. Listen <a href="http://transitionus.org/event/conversation-rob-hopkins#">here</a> to an admirably lucid conversation between Rob Hopkins and Carolyne Stayton for Transition US. But mostly I want in this paragraph to celebrate my dear friend and sometime co-worker <b>Karl James</b>, of <a href="http://www.thedialogueproject.com/">The Dialogue Project</a>: and in particular to ask you to watch, if you haven't already, a version of the presentation that Karl gave to <a href="http://thestory.org.uk/">The Story 2011</a> conference in February. Karl made a lot of friends that day: no wonder. He's an amazing man, and what he has to share is -- has repeatedly proved itself to be -- life-changing.<br /><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="225" mozallowfullscreen="" src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/20141340?title=0&amp;byline=0&amp;portrait=0" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="400"></iframe></div><br /><br /><b>5</b>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Well so this being the year that the establishment new writing spaces like the Royal Court and the Bush started to take an interest in what I might be up to, I thought I'd better play the game: so I spent a few weeks in the spring cramming in visits to real plays. You know, the actual written-down ones. Very interesting it was too. Of <i>Wastwater </i>we shall speak a bit further down the page. Dan Rebellato's <i>Chekhov in Hell </i>confused me a bit: aside from being the Duke of Twitter, Dan's a lovely man, a brilliant critic (read his <i><a href="http://www.danrebellato.co.uk/Site/Books/Entries/2009/6/2_THEATRE_%26_GLOBALIZATION.html">Theatre &amp; Globalization</a> </i>if you haven't, it's a perfect conjunction of nail and head) and a talented writer whose <i><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00zzy2g">My Life Is A Series of People Saying Goodbye</a> </i>was my favourite radio play of the year; I also suspect <i>Chekhov in Hell</i> is heavily dependent on an exoskeleton of ironies that the audience I was sitting with at the Soho hadn't quite tuned into, but what came across to me via the distorting chamber of their hysterical response around me was a muddled compendium of sub-Walliams &amp; Lucas skits on foreignness and apparently sincere expressions of misanthropic fatigue, terminating in a curious stub of gun-wielding melodrama, all played out on a mystifyingly drab and enervating set. Bit harsh, probably, but while recognizing the patterns of its wit and the line of its trajectory, I felt totally estranged from its "modern life is rubbish" sulks and from pretty much everything it wanted, especially everything it appeared to want from me -- unless it wanted exactly the recation it got from me, and secretly hated everyone else for lapping it up: in which case I still don't like it. I also found myself out of step with the audience for Philip Ridley's <i>Tender Napalm</i> -- perhaps his fullest and most energetically potent play since <i>Mercury Fur</i>, but a tricky one to pitch. David Mercatali's approach -- and I think in a way this was the bravest possible choice -- was to have the heroically committed Jack Gordon and Vinette Robinson amped up to 11 from the start, and only in the closing minutes to admit any kind of cadence, nuance or ambiguity into the mix. You can't fault the attempt to meet Ridley's writing head-on, at its own register -- and I bet Phil absolutely loved the production as a result; but I found it quickly outstayed its welcome, and became overbearing, strident (particularly in its adamant refusal of any trace of queerness), and occasionally cringemaking in its yoofy physical theatre platitudes. But again I am out of step with pretty much every critical response I've read to the production. Fair enough: I just think Phil's potentially more interesting than that -- more interesting, I think, than even he knows he is. So, of that little clutch of plays I saw, the only one I found myself really excited by -- and therefore hereby name Proper Actual Play of the Year -- was <b>David Eldridge</b>'s <i><a href="http://www.almeida.co.uk/event/the-knot-of-the-heart">The Knot of the Heart</a> </i>at the Almeida. Again, the pitch of the thing was initially really hard to tune in to: but once I managed that alignment, I found Eldridge's project terrifically exciting. Perhaps the closest analogue I can think of to it might be Almodovar -- not the first name one thinks of as adjacent in tone and ambition to Mr Eldridge, perhaps, but I absolutely loved seeing such an emotionally full-on middle-class melodrama, driven by women (especially terrific performances by Lisa Dillon and Margot Leicester) and by the terrible inadequacies of language: "I love you", Lucy and her mother keep saying to each other at the end, and the words bounce and ricochet between them as though in an infinite hall of mirrors: but <a href="http://sa4qe.blogspot.com/2008/03/sa4qe-statistics.html">there's nothing beyond the last visible dog but us</a>. <i>The Knot of the Heart </i>is a long play and a good deal less explicitly leftfield than most of what I lap up, but I was engrossed by the whole thing, and greatly cheered by its ambition, its scope and its achievement. This blog was in its earlier days home to a fair amount of misunderstanding and argy-bargy between myself and David Eldridge, and I dare say we're still not quite eye-to-eye, but I have to hand it to him: he knows what he's about: his control of <i>The Knot of the Heart </i>is masterly and I bet actors love to play his dialogue: it immediately rewards saying aloud with your whole mouth and your whole heart.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><b>6</b>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; I've seen the wondrous <a href="http://www.samamidon.com/">Sam Amidon</a> live more often than any other singer except Dick Gaughan, and I was looking forward hugely to his October appearance at Cecil Sharp House, one of London's loveliest acoustic music venues. Looking forward to it so much, in fact, that I was slightly resenting having to sit through his support act, some unknown-to-me personage called <a href="http://rachaeldadd.blogspot.com/"><b>Rachael Dadd</b></a>. In fact I almost suggested we miss her out and sit in the bar till Sam came on. But the great thing about the bar at Cecil Sharp is, absolutely nothing about it makes you want to stay there. So we went up to listen to Ms Dadd: and 45 minutes later, I was a changed man. Utterly, utterly changed: I mean really changed for the rest of that night, and I guess a little bit for ever, because I'll always have sat through her exquisite set, almost holding my breath for fear of exhaling too loudly and causing the music to crumple away. Starting out just with banjo and the frailest of vocals, and gradually opening up to uke (very nicely wielded) and guitar and piano, and a couple of other musicians covering harp and clarinet and percussion and all-sorts between them, she astounded me with the wonky meticulousness of her songs, the scalene lyrics half-obscure half-mundane, the melodies loopy and wilful and immediately tickling the ear, the arrangements poised but playful and perfectly lively, the tone of the whole thing as close as your closest friend but as distant as a kite at the seaside in your faded memory of childhood seaside kites. It was really just very, very fetching, and I fell more than a little in love, and at half-time we had to go and find a cash machine so that I could return to the merch stall and buy one of everything. Well, the CDs are very lovely and everything and I'm ever so glad of them, but glad in part because they remind me of how incredibly special the live experience was. I can't wait to see her again. In the meantime, here's a clip from a 2010 gig at the Union Chapel, which will give you the beginnings of an idea of just how astonishing she is.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="253" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/85deAQpsTPc?rel=0" width="440"></iframe></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><br /><b>7</b>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; OK, now, for a full directory of cute / funny animal sites, look no further than <a href="http://www.homestarrunner.com/systemisdown.html">shootingcutefishinafunnybarrel.com</a><span id="goog_209867387"></span><span id="goog_209867388"></span> -- but I have to admit nothing all year has quite gladdened my poor slow Bible-black heart like <b><a href="http://www.bestweekever.tv/2011-03-16/50-photos-of-basset-hounds-running/">50 Photos of Basset Hounds Running</a></b>. When you consider the military origins of the internet, it's hard not to feel that things are basically getting better.<br /><br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-dZW1BZ1Lx50/TvZs_SEDbrI/AAAAAAAADbE/FajVzIxmWXU/s1600/enhanced-buzz-11855-1300233868-15.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-dZW1BZ1Lx50/TvZs_SEDbrI/AAAAAAAADbE/FajVzIxmWXU/s400/enhanced-buzz-11855-1300233868-15.jpg" width="266" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">from <a href="http://www.bestweekever.tv/2011-03-16/50-photos-of-basset-hounds-running/">50 Photos of Basset Hounds Running </a></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><br /><br /><b>8</b>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; I probably only saw about a dozen films this year so bestowing end-of-term commendations on three of them in three different paragraphs may seem perhaps a little <i>de trop</i>. On the other hand, all three are, in different ways, notable for their reticence, so maybe my own excesses won't feel so unbalanced. Anyway, I'm going to begin by thanking all the parties concerned for what was I think my favourite film of 2011: Mike Mills's incredibly delightful <b><i>Beginners</i></b>. I was looking forward to <i>Beginners</i>, having quite liked Mills's low-key debut <i>Thumbsucker</i> (and some of his other previous work in music video and his graphic output from the midst of the <i><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kr_bepXYhfI">Beautiful Losers</a> </i>milieu) and feeling anyway like everybody in it would be watchable. On a rainy afternoon at the Cameo in Edinburgh it was exactly what I felt like seeing. But maybe because my expectations weren't <i>stratospherically</i> high, <i>Beginners </i>absolutely bowled me over. It's so, so beautiful: partly because of the great performances (a reminder of actually how good Ewan McGregor can be; gourmet stuff from a game Christopher Plummer; and I adored the warmth and subtlety of Goran Višnjić in the smallish role of Plummer's younger boyfriend, sweetly baffled by grief); but mostly because, brilliantly, Mike Mills managed to find in the rhythms of his direction and visual style a perfect match for the tone and cadence of his own writing -- something that writer-directors don't always achieve, Lord knows. It's obviously such a personal film to Mills and the rendering of his conception just feels like it's been achieved with a sort of off-kilter purity of vision. Increasingly, this sort of sweet-and-sour American indie stuff seems to come across like it's been written by a committee according to some filmschool template for aspiring heroes of Sundance, but the distinctive vision of Mills's film makes it feel way more universal, and kinder, and more truthful, and, in the best way, more sneaky: as in, sooner or later this film's going to sneak up on you and give you the sweetest kiss, and pretend to not notice you're crying, but hold your hand anyway, just lightly, till it's over. ...Oh, and the dog is <i>amazing</i>.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="243" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/DFM3AE64bgw?rel=0" width="420"></iframe></div><br /><br /><br /><b>9</b>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; After a couple of years where it felt like the benefit of the doubt was being extended on all sides, I have once again found myself a bit out of sync with the poetry scene this year, notwithstanding the intense pleasure and pride of having managed to get <i>Better Than Language </i>into the world, and actually sincerely liking very much all thirteen of the poets represented in that book (I mean them <i>and their work</i>!). Perhaps the making of that anthology brought me into a slightly shifted relation with the poem as object (rather than as event or open proposition). Probably I was also just repelled by watching, basically as an outsider these days, as any number of young, smart, politically engaged poets took their pristinely furious, ironically self-implicating (thus self-exonerating) positions on the summer riots and the Occupy movement and so on. Of course many of them were also much more hands-on in those contexts than I was -- especially in relation to Occupy Cambridge -- and I wouldn't anyway claim any high ground: except that the widely practised manoeuvre of both insisting on and simultaneously disavowing a kind of hypomanic ideological purity -- each contradictory gesture endorsing the next -- has become a kind of incandescent gymnastics that, as an earlier poet put it, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyJdiE0l23c&amp;ob=av2n">says nothing to me about my life</a>. The book-as-event seemed as though it might produce some interesting effects: J.H. Prynne's <i>Kazoo Dreamboats, or On What There Is</i>, recently out from <a href="http://plantarchy.us/home.html">Critical Documents</a>, is as fluently present in a fully public sense as anything in the whole of Prynne's oeuvre, and pretty exciting in the (surprisingly long, smooth) moves it makes, though I've only had it a week and I can't pretend to have made much study of it at depth yet; Simon Jarvis's <i>Dionysus Crucified</i>, given a quite astonishing production by <a href="http://www.grasp-press.co.uk/">Grasp</a>, is remarkable for its ambition and nearly as much for its achievement, though it still cannot quite put its finger on what it is doing in its public life, retaining some tendencies towards narcissism slightly in excess of its charisma (especially when viewed, as I suppose I must do, in a loosely Marcusian sort of way). There is a great deal to admire and, at least incidentally, to relish in both these much-discussed books, but I wouldn't say either seems to me as cogent and as fully realised as, say, John Hall and Peter Hughes's <i>Interscriptions</i>, in an elegantly assured edition from <a href="http://www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk/theknivesforksandspoonspress/HOME.html">Knives Forks and Spoons</a>. The social repertory of Hall and Hughes's painstaking collaboration is both expansive and detailed, and the distribution of its textual and graphical weight is utterly secure and rather deft; it occupies a literary and visual space that to me feels considerably more advanced in its way than either of the aforementioned (if there were any point at all in drawing such a comparison): it's interesting, what gets hailed as important, when rigour is perceived only in the key-scratch marks of strain and unrelenting. However: partly because it points beyond these tensions, and partly because its braw compendiousness is in itself a measure of the inclusivity that is in this moment probably just the ticket, I'm saying the poetry book I'm hailing above all others this year is <b>Francis Crot</b>'s invaluable <a href="http://damnthecaesars.org/punchpress.html"><i>HAX</i></a>, (Punch P.), a novel-length (and -shaped) poem in which Crot's scanner-like mythopoetic convulsions reach their first apotheosis. The seething energy of this book, of its collaged Londony smuts and broken contingencies, means it pisses thrillingly and from a great height on the remains of the once-significant Iain Sinclair: remains that will now only be of interest to Iain Sinclair himself reincarnated as his own avenging vulture. No other book has touched it this year for quickness of thought, multiplicity or issue: though the fifth in Grasp's excellent Folds series, a mini-anthology collecting writings from the end of last year by four of <i>BTL</i>'s finest -- Francesca Lisette, Jonny Liron, Joe Luna and Timothy Thornton, runs it close and brings an entirely different order of visual lucidity to not dissimilar ends. One might also mention three exceptionally helpful critical works: Keston Sutherland's long-awaited and beautifully turned <i><a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/S/bo11455787.html">Stupefaction: A Radical Anatomy of Phantoms</a> </i>(incidentally also remarkably good value for money, a bloody lovely hardback for not much more than a tenner, which I hope will help it secure the wide readership, not least outside the academy, that it deserves and can do something fruitful with); Scott Thurston's <a href="http://www.shearsman.com/pages/books/catalog/2011/thurstonTP.html"><i>Talking Poetics: Dialogues in Innovative Poetry </i></a>from Shearsman, which is a really gripping collection of extended interviews with four exemplary poets (Karen Mac Cormack, Jennifer Moxley, Caroline Bergvall and Andrea Brady); and in a neck of the woods that I refuse to imagine being somewhere else, Raphael Zarka's <i><a href="http://www.editions-b42.com/books/day-no-waves/">On A Day With No Waves: A Chronicle Of Skateboarding 1779-2009</a>, </i>which came out last year but didn't cross my path till this year, and which provides a wonderfully detailed survey of a species of poetic imagination that I'm afraid I begin to doubt I'll ever actually encounter (except in tantalising glimpses) in even the most imaginative of poets.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><b>10</b>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; You'll be astounded <i>forever </i>to know that I'm not much of a game-player, except in the very least competitive circumstances (and save the occasional fiendish Mastermind tournament with Jonny: I grind algorithmically, he intuits like a big Puck). This is the kind of thing I love, though: <b><a href="http://baboon.co.il/mitoza/">Mitoza</a></b> is a very simple A-or-B toy whose inventiveness and refined playfulness is -- as far as I can tell -- really inexhaustibly appealing, as is its gorgeously crafty aesthetic. If you don't already know it, give it a click: I promise it'll make you smile as soon as you start to play.<br /><br /><br /><div style="border: 2px solid black; padding: 2em;"><b>Interlude #1</b><br /><br /><i>In August, the lovely folks of the <a href="http://www.birdsongmag.com/">Birdsong Collective</a> asked me to complete their <a href="http://www.birdsongmag.com/category/five-on-it/">'Five On It'</a> questionnaire, which has been answered over the years by many famouser persons than me, including such luminous paragons as <a href="http://jessicayatrofsky.com/">Jessica Yatrofsky</a>, <a href="http://slavamogutin.squarespace.com/">Slava Mogutin</a> and </i><i><a href="http://patrickdewitt.net/">Patrick deWitt</a></i><i>. So I duly sent back my thoughts thereon: but it seems they've suddenly slowed right down and the Five On It pages haven't been updated since the end of August. So I don't know if my contribution, which they never acknowledged anyway, will ever be seen there; even if it is, I don't suppose it matters much if I share my responses with you first, thereby rescuing the exercise from having been an (admittedly not very onerous) waste of time.</i><br /><br /><br /><b>1)&nbsp; What’s the last song you listened to?</b><br /><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dgR07WoxLw&amp;ob=av2e">"Velocity Bird" - Peter Murphy</a><br /><br /><b>2)&nbsp; What did you want to be when you were ten?</b><br />Naked.<br /><br /><b>3)&nbsp; What’s the best advice you've ever been given?</b><br />If you're trying to do something difficult, override your natural tendency to hold your breath. Keep breathing.<br />&nbsp;<b>&nbsp;</b><br /><b>4)&nbsp; What’s the last thing you were obsessed with?</b><br />I'm pretty much totally obsessed with my work, and with the political agenda on which it's premised and the ethical questions that are churning inside it. This is consuming enough that any other obsessions I may experience - artistic, sexual, whatever - are quickly absorbed into the work, which tends both to alleviate and to intensify them. Right now I am particularly obsessed with Book I of Euclid's <i>Elements</i>.<br />&nbsp;<b>&nbsp;</b><br /><b>5) What are you afraid of?</b><br />Falling. Drowning. Team sports. Cocaine. Great poetry. Boring art. Heterosexuality.<br /><br /></div><br /><b> </b><br /><b> </b><br /><b> </b><br /><br /><br /><b>11</b>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; I <a href="http://beescope.blogspot.com/2011/12/rest.html">wrote earlier in the month</a> about <b>Lisa Jeschke + Lucy Beynon</b>'s starkly fascinating, suggestive, frequently wrong-footing work in response to the Queer DIY workshop, and as part of this survey I really wanted to mention one piece in particular that has snagged on some sticky-out bit of my imagination:<br /><br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-V0yrbekDrYs/TveYxn37M6I/AAAAAAAADbQ/aeSZPqbIrZ4/s1600/6+-+task+3%252C+image.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="252" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-V0yrbekDrYs/TveYxn37M6I/AAAAAAAADbQ/aeSZPqbIrZ4/s400/6+-+task+3%252C+image.jpeg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Lisa Jeschke + Lucy Beynon, 'Self-Portrait' (2011)</td></tr></tbody></table><br />I don't think I want to say too much about this piece -- as most people will recognize, this is a National Insurance number, produced as a work on paper on a large scale (I don't know exact dimensions but it took both of them to hold the version they brought along to the closing DIY session); they presented it by way of response to one of the tasks in that workshop, which requested a text to be made containing an element of personal disclosure and designed specifically for public circulation; it also seems to refer back to an earlier task which asked participants to create some kind of naked self-portrait. I find this response by turns funny, vaguely troubling, sharply frightening and ineffably sad, in its part-ironic redramatization of the questions that lie behind those commissions, and the places within our political culture where those questions ramify most pressingly. I think it's a remarkable piece of visual theatre.<br /><br /><br /><br /><b>12</b>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; This one is partly here because <a href="http://statesofdeliquescence.blogspot.com/2011/04/some-glorious.html">elsewhere in the Great Big Interwebularity it is recorded</a> in all dimensions of perpetuity<i> </i>that I "hate" <a href="http://www.littlebulbtheatre.com/"><b>Little Bulb</b></a>. Which I'm sure was at least partly true when I announced it, some considerable time ago, on the evidence of a series of glimpses and fleeting impressions of something scratchy they did in the bar at BAC while I was not quite in the bar, which seemed a bit clunky and overbearing and winsome and lots of other things I'm not very at home to (except of course when they crop up in my own work). The thing is, I feel I want to issue a corrective -- if I were any sort of a man this would be in 36-point Impact, but I'm no sort of a man, &amp; if you can imagine me as a man you'll thank me for knowing my limits -- to say that, because so many trusted friends (including Maddy Costa, whose blog it is that preserves my stupid hyperbolic 'hatred' for the generations) told me I must, I went to see <i>Operation Greenfield</i> at Soho, and I thought it absolutely rocked. In fact I think it's pretty much the best thing I've seen in its weight class all year. Its constant tack-sharp movement between the ingenious and the ingenuous (oh my dears won't you miss this clever writing when it's gone?) is not only likeable, but <i>more </i>likeable because it's <i>more than </i>likeable: the fleet performance, the blatant making chops, the rolling structure, the tonal care: it's all really really smart -- the product not least (I imagine) of them having done it a fair few times by now. At a time when truly accomplished devising with a strong company signature seems thin on the ground, I'm prepared to be among Little Bulb's bigger fans. Apart from anything else, <i>Operation Greenfield </i>has a good good heart, and I freely confess it made me do a Little Blub. And, you know, I feel bad about the earlier 'hating' thing, but then I remember that Andrew Haydon used to hate me a little bit -- "the fluffy-headed person's Johann Hari", i.i.r.c. -- and now look, he's on the back of my book telling everyone I'm like Tom Stoppard or something, Tom Stoppard if Mark Lawson had never heard of him. Whatever. Y'all see what I'm saying.<br /><br /><br /><br /><b>13</b>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Christmas wouldn't be Christmas... no, wait, Thompson's wouldn't be Thompson's without some serious (and only partly sexual) genuflection before the genius of <a href="http://www.dennis-cooper.net/"><b>Dennis Cooper</b></a>. In some ways there are oceans between our respective practices and styles, whole toxic oceans full of chimerical bioluminescent piscoids and variably buoyant sewage babies; but no one maker (aside from immediate peers) has had such a profound effect on my work, and my thinking around it, during the period that this blog has charted. And Dennis's activities this year continue the trend, in so far as I've been able to follow them at all. What certainly has fallen away, regretfully, is my committed attendance (and you really do have to be committed -- or, at least, that's the only way I think I can enjoy doing it, all-or-nothing as is the brand essence of my wont) at Dennis's notorious <a href="http://denniscooper-theweaklings.blogspot.com/">B.L.O.G.</a>, which bucks a trend by appearing healthier and heartier than ever. The short spell where I did get back into the rhythm of it, in the summer, weirdly happened to coincide with the tragically early passing of the blog's near-legendary sometime contributor <a href="http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/antonio-urdiales">Antonio Urdiales</a>: and the way that the community there, and Dennis not least, <a href="http://denniscooper-theweaklings.blogspot.com/2011/08/weekend-for-and-by-antonio-urdiales-day.html">dealt with that event</a> and its aftermath, and were prompted to reflect on what kind of meeting-place that blog has been over the past few years, was a very moving and (if this word doesn't jar in the circumstances) impressive period. I've also just finished reading Dennis's latest novel, <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Marbled-Swarm-P-S-Dennis-Cooper/dp/0061715638"><i>The Marbled Swarm</i></a>, which is an almost supernaturally gripping read (given that it's in every way an art novel, a glinting mobile of conscious artifices rather than any kind of a plot-driven page-turner). Thank fuck, the book certainly resists precis -- or at least, I'd feel like a flat-footed ogre for even trying; but it is an extraordinarily sustained inquiry into the novel as a genre of performance, in which the longest and most hazardous distances are those between ontology and epistemology, between the staged ideal and the bathos of experience, and of course between any two bodies, or the body and its wearer; and, Lord knows, between all of the above and the perpetual desolating shortfall of language. As a quite diamantine study of gesture and consequentiality, and the ways in which gayness can be weirdly refracted in these, <i>The Marbled Swarm</i> is totally compelling; beyond, or before, that, though, it is a game of literature, which Cooper plays by now like a grandmaster. To my mind his best -- certainly his most achieved (if that's the word) -- post-George Miles Cycle novel, it reminds me above all of one of the few original visual artworks I own, which I picked up for a knockdown fifty quid because the artist had made some error with the fixing chemicals she used, meaning (she tells me) that the image will slowly disappear over the next couple of decades. Cooper's novels are often like this: certainly they are objects, rather than events; and they are closed, rather than open (or simulating openness or even woundedness). But they are changing, even while you hold them in front of your body; they are in motion; they are already leaving. -- As a postscript, I should also mention the soundtrack release of <a href="http://www.squidco.com/miva/merchant.mv?Screen=PROD&amp;Store_Code=S&amp;Product_Code=15213"><i>Them</i></a>, Dennis's performance collaboration with choreographer Ishmael Houston-Jones and musician Chris Cochrane. The piece dates back to 1995 but was revived last year, and the audio portion was this year issued on John Zorn's Tzadik label. (Some readers will recognize the Cooper / Cochrane / Zorn axis from the fascinating if slightly misfiring <i>Weird Little Boy </i>project on Avant in the mid 90s.) <i>Them </i>as a live performance proposition looks pretty exciting and I'm sorry not to have been able to catch it (yet -- I'm thinking I might try and nip to Paris to see it in the spring): but the audio version, especially if taken on its own terms rather than heard as an element stranded on its own in relation to a whole raft of unknowable absent cues, is a rich mix, complex, unnerving and, on headphones, claustrophobically intimate. Cochrane's sense for the drama of proximity is unerringly strong, and Cooper's readings of his own texts are as scarily poised and exposed as I've ever heard him do, especially on 'Dead Friends', which in this context is almost impossible to bear with. Jonny and I intend (as far as I know) to continue working on a piece called <i>Slaves</i>, based on a recurring wet nightmare that Dennis's blog has had for as long as I've known it; right now I wonder if the implicit challenges of that project are at some level what's stopping me and Jonny from working together at all... Well, time will tell, I guess, but it's never felt more important to me to stay close to what Dennis is doing: he is an artist at the height of his depths.<br /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="253" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/L3wGZffB8mo?rel=0" width="440"></iframe></div><br /><br /><br /><b>14</b> &nbsp;&nbsp; If you're basically a softy queer anarcho-syndicalist in possession of a limited range of plaid shirts, like I basically am, then this has been quite a whirlwind year: ideas I've been banging on about for years and sounding like a crackpot are suddenly being discussed on telly as if there were something important and pertinent and real -- and <i>moderate!</i> -- about them: which of course there is. More importantly, more people than ever are living those ideas, or at least living in proximity or in conscious relation to them: and if there's a body of water between me and, say, the Occupy movement, or UK Uncut, in terms of what the agenda needs to be if we're to get the radical change we need rather than (to be much too blunt about it) making a tactical grab for breathing space through efforts of mitigation and deferral, then at least the conversations arising from those disagreements now feel more like applied political thought than <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YR1I1fWCj6s&amp;ob=av2e">cloud-8</a> pinhead-dancing theology. As I say above, sometimes the conversations around where we are and where we're all going have felt very difficult and scratchy and hard to control, and differences of opinion and emphasis, while totally acceptable and necessary and fruitful at a rational level, can often, and especially in tired and nearly-overwhelmed people, be emotionally very gruelling and sad and isolating. And of course the web is full of networks which are just as likely, if not more so, to incubate discord and sniping as support and understanding. So when stuff emerges that can be helpful, that can find the right balance of reassurance and disorientation, restorative soothing and provocation, I've felt incredibly grateful for it. Actually mostly for me this year that's been about returning again and again to Diane DiPrima's <a href="http://www.homemadejam.org/mix/diprima-letters.html"><i>Revolutionary Letters</i></a>, and of course to John Holloway's <a href="http://www.plutobooks.com/display.asp?K=9780745330082&amp;"><i>Crack Capitalism</i></a> which has frequently been just the ticket (and which enough of our comrades have now read that, even if they disagree with its theses or its mode of presentation, we can at least talk together about it and that's almost always positive). But other, more fleeting pop-ups can really help too, as lifebuoys almost. At the start of the year I was still feeling hugely inspired by the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination's <a href="http://artsagainstcuts.wordpress.com/2010/12/06/a-users-guide-to-demanding-the-impossible/"><i>Users Guide to <strike>(Demanding)</strike> the Impossible</i></a>, which emerged last December and, for my money (we need a new expression to go in there please), hardly puts a foot wrong from start to finish. And I was impressed too, and heartened, by <a href="http://libcom.org/library/letter-uk-uncutters-violent-minority">this letter</a> from members of the Solidarity Federation to members of UK Uncut following everyone's very various March 26th actions and the quickly subsequent concerted attempts by the media and certain retrograde elements on the left to force activists of different stripes to condemn or disown each other. But actually the smartest and most cheering thing I saw all year from this spot on the dial -- this time in response to Occupy Wall St -- was to be found, as smart and cheering things so often are, in an unexpected space: the Toronto <i>Globe and Mail</i>'s <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/celebrity-photos/celebrity-photos-of-the-week-oct-12/article2197635/"><b>'Celebrity Photos of the Week'</b></a> from mid-October. The dry-as-a-bone sardonic twinkling of the photo captions gradually opens up an extraordinarily reverberant space (and a manifestly serious one) between the twin-track realities of how we (mostly) are now living, without all the histrionic and strenuous gestures of, for example, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HN8BI52su0c">Emily Maitlis playing comic-book tough</a> and looking nothing but ridiculous (especially by comparison with the composure and painstaking intelligence of her interviewee) on <i>Newsnight</i>.<br /><br /><br /><br /><b>15</b>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; For someone who doesn't own a tv and doesn't watch tv, I seem to watch a surprising amount of tv. You surely know already how devoted I am to <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfeyUGZt8nk"><i>Masterchef</i></a> -- especially the Professionals version, which was extraordinary this year and at which I wept like a little girl on a scary rollercoaster more than once. (By "little girl on a scary rollercoaster" of course I mean "<a href="http://beescope.blogspot.com/2011/07/forces-in-motion.html">me on a really tame rollercoaster</a>".) And I am peculiarly fond of the languid repartee that bounces between Alexander Armstrong and Richard Thingy on <i>Pointless</i>. But if I were to pick a single show to nominate as Outstanding TV Whatever Of The Year, then it's neck and neck between two sitcoms. Series 2 of <i>Rev</i> has been remarkable, as the writing grows in confidence and the characters pick up further nuances and greebles (I've particularly enjoyed watching Simon McBurney flesh out the previously slightly over-broad Archdeacon); the ends of both episodes five and six were jaw-dropping, and you don't often say that about a sitcom -- which <i>Rev </i>hardly is any more. But I feel like a bit of a middle-class Guardianista twit going on about <i>Rev</i> so I'm going to award the gong* [*there is no gong] instead to <b><i>Him &amp; Her</i></b>, which seems to have gone somewhere quite a lot darker this series in a way that I initially found hard to like: but Sarah Solemani and Russell Tovey portray the central relationship so exquisitely that you keep getting drawn back -- and Joe Wilkinson as Dan is a gift that keeps on giving. I hugely admire Stefan Golaszewski's writing, too -- I don't know (though I'm sure I could probably find out) how much the dialogue comes out of improvisation, if at all -- however much, he does a fantastic job, and I'm already excited about series 3 and where else the characters and the format can go. (And, to save you the bother, I may as well point out that if you take the initial letter of each sentence in the foregoing paragraph, and rearrange them, it more or less spells out: "me want to do sexytime with Russell Tovey". Just putting that out there, subliminally.)<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="253" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/h5aL64Z_kNg?rel=0" width="440"></iframe></div><br /><br /><br /><b>16</b>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; When it comes to the year's bigger theatre/dance/performance shows, it's hard to think of anything I've really enjoyed that I haven't also felt conflicted about. (Maybe by this point in the cosmic proceedings a response of unreserved adoration could only apply to underachieving work, anyway; maybe it's not cleanliness that's next to godliness now, but smeariness?) The 30th anniversary restaging of Lucinda Childs's <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKuSHE4OMGk"><i>DANCE</i></a> at the Barbican was enthrallingly joyous, technically prodigious and in every way captivating: but it was also very pointedly keeping its distance (and Philip Glass's gorgeous teeming score likewise), in a way that marked it out as a product of pre-contemporary intelligences. Dave St Pierre's <i><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CApElRFSiUA">Un peu de tendresse bordel de merde!</a> </i>at Sadler's Wells ended up the very model of kindness, its achingly beautiful final sequence alleviating and more than counterbalancing the anxieties the company teasingly educes earlier in the show -- anxieties which are not just those around nudity and the reckless obliteration of the fourth wall; but for all that, the clowning gender-play never stopped feeling blandly misogynistic to me, so that the experience of the evening as a whole was of sharing a space with bullies who turned out to have hearts of gold and who only wanted to play and who never meant to hurt you: yes, well, misogynists never do, and anyway, what's more, they always want to tell you how much they <i>love women</i>; so, some blissful stuff (albeit too much of the heavy lifting was left to Arvo Bloody Part), but too much fly and too little ointment, maybe. Shall we then salute above all <i><b><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAOK7Va_3vE">The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic</a> </b></i>at the Lowry for Manchester International Festival, for much of the opening hour of which (having got past the pre-show tableau of sleek black dogs patrolling a sumptuous mortuary, which I'd contentedly have watched for much longer) I quite wanted to beat Robert Wilson to death with a wooden spoon, very very slowly. The desperately unamusing caricaturish recounting of Abramovic's early years in Wilson's exhausted (and exhausting) cartoon expressionist style -- aided and abetted by Willem Dafoe in heart-sinking whiteface -- nearly killed the whole evening for me. But once that backstory was out of the way, and its abject smugness had been punctured -- mostly by the breathtaking presence of Antony Hegarty (about whom I've never particularly cared, but who abundantly reveals in this live setting the penetrating charisma that his avid fans kept telling me about) -- then it was all, wondrously, about images that stood only for themselves and the matter of their own duration, and bodies that both fulfilled and thankfully failed to map perfectly onto the matrices that were designed for them: in other words, theatre excellently surviving a botched attempt on its life. (For further discussion of which, see <a href="http://beescope.blogspot.com/2011/07/forces-in-motion.html">this post</a>, and its Parable of Kira O'Reilly's Arsehole: soon to be a major motion picture, in my dreams.)<br /><br /><br /><br /><b>17</b>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; For the first time in years, I happened to be in town during the <a href="http://www.bfi.org.uk/llgff/">London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival</a>. It was a quietish year for LLGFF -- the programme had shrunk considerably following budget cuts -- but I was really glad of almost everything I saw. <i><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCxqJgpejbs">We Were Here</a> </i>was stunning, a desperately sad but profoundly affirmative documentary on the early days of the AIDS crisis in San Fransisco: a film everyone should see; another excellent doc, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eI8WS1D_WwQ"><i>Making the Boys</i></a>, told the story of Mart Crowley's pioneering <i>The Boys in the Band</i>, and inevitably ended up being an AIDS documentary too, though what was really shocking was a vox pop montage of Pride-marching twinks who had never heard of <i>The Boys in the Band </i>-- depressing in itself but alarming too if gay communities really are failing to pass on what's salient in their cultural and political heritage: that short memories can be lethal is an observation that applies to much more than just sexual health. Another interesting documentary in the main feature strand, <a href="http://www.bfi.org.uk/llgff/node/1390"><i>Mutantes (Punk Porn Feminism)</i></a> followed some intriguing and provoking tendencies in queer self-staging and group formation, and checked in with a few artists and activists who've been important to me (above all the mighty <a href="http://www.dellagracevolcano.com/">Del La Grace Volcano</a>); but -- I mean, it doesn't really matter a cahoot what I think, but -- I was slightly downcast to see so much queer/feminist activity that was so in thrall to (even an ironic) phallocentrism and the aping, but hardly <i>detournement</i> exactly, of pretty standard heteronormative power play: those things don't seem to me to become liberating or productive simply by dint of their occurring in a queer-identifying context. Among the fiction features, I truly enjoyed Xavier Dolan's coolly stylish <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znpU_Aup-Bg"><i>Heartbeats</i></a> and I felt very fondly about Gregg Araki's <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xu9NkMCElMk"><i>Kaboom</i></a>, though there was something odd about the mix of relatively expensive (post-<i>Mysterious Skin</i>) visuals with Araki's samo sophomoric writing: I really like both elements but they don't always sit together all that happily. Still, two very breezily sexy films, and really interesting to feel the gayness of <i>Heartbeats</i> and the queerness of <i>Kaboom</i> not merely overlapping but kind of 69-ing. The huge surprise at LLGFF, though, and my nomination for epic art fag film of the year, was Bruce LaBruce's <i>L.A. Zombie</i>. Except actually the award goes to <b><i>L</i>.</b><i><b>A. Zombie Hardcore</b></i>, which the BFI were sadly unable to show. The heavily shredded softcore version -- still fairly eyeopening in places -- is pretty incoherent in terms of continuity; but then, so is the uncut version, so I think we have to assume it's deliberate. (In which case it's pretty cool.) What's really remarkable (and admirable) about <i>L.A. Zombie</i>, in both its versions, is how profoundly serious it is, and how critically acute. More than you might expect from a film in which, essentially, a sad zombie wanders an L.A. wasteland, fucking a series of fresh male corpses back to life. It will be a movie that's written about a lot in years to come, I should think, and a set text on queer film courses, and so on. LaBruce has consistently been the most politically interesting -- not to say provocative -- queer filmmaker on the block, but what's fascinating here is that in taking a step back from the overt sloganeering and emphatic iconography of, say, <i><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSWIrKBMBNk">The Raspberry Reich</a> </i>(and its pornier version <i>The Revolution Is My Boyfriend</i>), a much more developed political sensibility seems to come through, with room for ambiguity and contradiction and a kind of melancholy that actually comes very close to how I feel the idea of the erotic might be working now on the left. Apart from anything else, <i>L.A. Zombie Hardcore </i>is a very odd offering indeed approached as porn: which I kind of think queer porn ought to be. After the screening of the cut version at the BFI, the movie stayed with me for a long time, subtly changing the look and smell and taste of everything: and it was impossible to say how, or why: and that's why I think it's a very considerable work of art -- especially in the hardcore version, if for no other reason than that there's nothing in the movie, or in its aftereffects, that isn't amplified by zombified François Sagat having an unsimulated hard-on, and a culture in which the opportunity to see that is curtailed has definitely got itself into a weird pickle. -- Worth saying also that it's also visually rather an accomplished film, often beautiful if dystopically bleak. Los Angeles has never looked so fucked.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="243" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/t0DQDlm6bYI?rel=0" width="420"></iframe></div><br /><br /><br /><b>18</b>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; While we're dealing in rudenesses, let us recall the strange and faintly nauseous joy of the baroque excesses to be found in the <a href="http://deadspin.com/5830160/bunny+fucking-cockbrisket-and-serial-commas-a-copyeditors-guide-to-nicholson-bakers-filthy-new-book">copy editor's style sheet</a> for <b>Nicholson Baker</b>'s novel <i>House of Holes</i>. This is mostly a list of all the dictionary-defeatingly obscure and confected sexual terminology with which Baker festoons his story: and as such the article unites two of my dearest predelictions: obscenity and alphabetical order. Could be worth adapting for the stage when everyone's bored of <i>Hippo World Guest Book </i>again.<br /><br /><br /><br /><b>19</b>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Absolutely no doubt as to the pre-eminent art show of the year: <b><a href="http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/gerhardrichter/default.shtm">Gerhard Richter: <i>Panorama</i></a> </b>at Tate Modern was so great as to be deeply humbling. I was prepared for Richter's quiet seriousness and his breathtaking technical resources; I certainly wasn't prepared for the effects produced by the stylistic and formal breadth of his work -- a strong impression finally not of dissonance (or a kind of heavy dilettantism) but of consonance, the cohesion of a lifelong project to comprehend the nature of appearance and apparentness and apparition and artifice. For Richter, the act of seeing is so strongly an act of making, somewhere between promise and proposition, that even his most reduced or abstracted pieces urge on the viewer some admittance of human complicity: by which I suppose I mean I've seldom met work in which the use of colour, for example, seems to have such a sussuration of ethical concern buzzing within it. There was overwhelming work in every room of the show, but it's the <i>October 18, 1977 </i>paintings around Ulrike Meinhof and the Rote Armee Fraktion that stayed scored on my mind and implanted somewhere unreachable in my body for weeks afterwards: a sober but tenderizing reckoning with the mundanities of the outrageous.<br /><br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-x6-rUGR_8AQ/TvijLg1sFCI/AAAAAAAADb0/BJcFNq3zN7c/s1600/3677.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="291" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-x6-rUGR_8AQ/TvijLg1sFCI/AAAAAAAADb0/BJcFNq3zN7c/s400/3677.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Gerhard Richter, 'Festnahme 1' ('Arrest 1'), oil on canvas, 1988</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><br /><br /><br /><b>20</b>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; And the Andy Field Memorial Rosette for the Best Theatre I Didn't Actually See But That Nonetheless Captured My Imagination By Other (Not Necessarily Ancillary) Means Thereby Still Qualifying As An Artistic Experience Of Some Merit goes to... <b><i>BAAL</i> </b>by Melbourne's Malthouse Theatre and Sydney Theatre Company. The YouTube trailer for <i>BAAL </i>is a wildly enticing glimpse into a stage world that's more familiar from dreams than from stuff I've seen elsewhere. Dreams, I mean, of what a contemporary classical theatre could, and should be -- not just dreams of beardy barechested rock stars in rain storms who later go on to transmogrify into unicycle-riding deer. Only maybe <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnNHGwv_7Fc">Gisele Vienne</a>'s work exerts as strong a pull at the point when it's no more than an idea and an image or two; maybe also Societas Rafaello Sanzio, at least back before R. Castellucci jumped the shark, turned round, went back to the shark, climbed up onto its back, did a poo on its head, took a photograph of the poo, and sold the photograph to the Barbican for a million pounds. I think had <i>BAAL</i> been playing even a couple of minutes nearer London than its Antipodes, I'd have made an expedition of it, I'm sure -- and not necessarily been rewarded for my efforts, according to some reviews. But in a year when I've thought quite a bit about the value -- the virtue, even -- of the <i>glimpse</i> as a political event, this minute-and-a-bit of <i>BAAL</i> achieves way more than its trailer function of making me want to see the show. Specifically I suppose it makes me want to <i>make </i>the show that brings this other unseeable show into a closer relationship with everything I am as an artist. Which is more than you can say for the entire career of Trevor Nunn, laid end to end until it reaches the Circle Bar. Anyway, see for yourself -- bearing in mind I may have built it up a tad now:<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="253" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/92CFuJqGxTM?rel=0" width="440"></iframe></div><br /><br /><br /><div style="border: 2px solid black; padding: 2em;"><b>Interlude #2</b><br /><br /><i>Longterm readers will perhaps miss above all the relentlessly upbeat tone here at Thompson's, where seldom is heard a discouraging word and what have you. Nonetheless, this being Christmas and all, let's get into the swing of things by bitching about some stuff that missed the mark (or worse) this year</i><b></b>.<br /><br /><br />I think the film I disliked most this year -- and this might also win the Grand Prize for Most Obnoxious Cultural Artefact -- was Terence Malick's <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXRYA1dxP_0"><i>The Tree of Life</i></a>. I had every expectation of loving it, as a longstanding admirer of Malick, or at least of everything I've ever seen of his; furthermore I was inclined to trust some of the ecstatic reviews that were coming out, which seemed to be defending the film against charges that I instinctively <i>distrust </i>(self-indulgence, pretentiousness, too-slow-ness, etc.). And I happily admit that there's lots in the film to admire, if not much to like (apart from the splendidly lame-ass CGI dinosaurs). But politically it's very hard not to see it as a not-too-distant cousin of <i>The Birth of a Nation</i>: essentially it's a half-day-long infomercial, modelled perhaps on the discarded draft storyboard for a hair conditioner advert, and designed to inculcate in an audience that it first renders hypnotically suggestible an unambiguous message to the effect that the last 13.7 billion years (approx.) have been one long triumphant sweep leading inexorably and righteously to the untouchable supremacy of white-American patriarchy and heteronormativity, iconically represented in brutal but well-meaning Brad Pitt clenching and unclenching his jaw, and Jessica Chastain strolling winsomely along a numinous beach in a wafty frock, while a voiceover inexplicably <i>doesn't</i> keep warning you about the possible side effects of the antidepressants they're subliminally trying to make you want to be addicted to. This, my dears, this Ocean Breeze-scented fascism, is, we are invited to accept without further ado, the apotheosis of humanity, beyond which heaven is only a dainty footstep away. ...Well, excuse me while I kick the sky, but <i>The Tree of Life</i> basically made me want to watch <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_S4fibeoMU&amp;feature=related"><i>Paris is Burning</i></a> on a loop for the rest of my life, occasionally interspersed with random frames from Gunter Brus and Kurt Kren's <i>20. September </i>and an assortment of the homemade videoclips uploaded to whichever is the world's least blatantly racist web site for aficionados of dry fistfucking.<br /><br />Which brings me neatly to Simon Stephens's <i><a href="http://www.royalcourttheatre.com/whats-on/wastwater">Wastwater</a> </i>at the Royal Court. ...Actually, I'm not going to be comically mean about <i>Wastwater</i>, because it made me frustrated rather than angry, and just a bit forlorn because there is nothing quite as disconsoling as the loneliness that comes from being the only one in your gang who really doesn't get something that is apparently self-evident to everybody else. I'm a fan of Stephens's work, and a fan too of Katie Mitchell: but for me, this first meeting brought out the absolute worst in both of them. In Stephens, that means a sort of ponderous restraint, of the variety that "serious" mainstream British poets like to throw down to show they're being serious; a kind of cliqueyness in the conceptual universe, in which everything points to and leans on everything else, but the circuit is so self-supporting and so associatively meagre that nothing in it can really be critically interrogated from outside. In Mitchell, it means getting everyone to fidget a lot. That's because real people fidget when they're thinking about things; unless they don't, in which case they don't look like real people are supposed to look according to Katie Mitchell because Katie Mitchell thinks real people fidget a lot when they're thinking about things. I wonder if Katie Mitchell has ever considered the possibility that there's something about <i>her presence</i> specifically that makes people fidget a lot when she's<i> </i>around -- you know, like the Queen thinks everything smells like fresh paint. Anyway, Katie Mitchell has been through <i>Wastwater </i>with her set of four Ryman's coloured highlighter pens and has methodically colour-coded the fidgeting, and then at the end she's going to get Angus Wright to do an absolutely fucking <i>huge</i> fidget, an unprecedentedly massive expressive-dance fidget, like the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEt_Xgg8dzc">Bob Beamon</a> of fidgeting, way bigger than Stephens has asked for in the script, because Angus Wright is a marvellous actor who it's a shame to waste on mimsy nuance and anyway who knows what might happen to the scale of people's fidgeting when they're <i>in extremis</i> e.g. stuck on stage for twenty minutes with Amanda Hale. Oh maybe I am going to be comically mean after all, if this passes for comically mean that is. So in other words Simon Stephens is a fine writer and Katie Mitchell is a great director and <i>Wastwater </i>may even be an excellent play but also Leopold and Loeb were probably kind to their mothers, innit, and sometimes something awful just happens because two people bring out the worst in each other: and what, after all, is the cold-blooded murder of a teenage boy if it's not just a big colour-coded fidget gone terribly, terribly wrong.<br /><br />And for my final choice... Well, I'm afraid (or happy) to say I can't quite bring myself to castigate Kate Bush, even though I was peeved by her mischievous attempt to downplay expectations for her end-of-year <i>50 Words for Snow </i>album by releasing <i>Director's Cut </i>in the spring, on which she cunningly re-recorded eleven tracks from <i>The Sensual World </i>and <i>The Red Shoes</i> to make them all at least 30% worse. (Though I suppose she was right to attempt this subterfuge if by doing so she helped anyone to stomach more easily the tremulously revolting title track of <i>50 Words for Snow</i>, on which her muted call-and-response with Stephen Fry is a bit like watching your fat middle-aged naked next-door neighbours through a gap in their curtains while they indulge in <i>extremely</i> light sexual fetish-play involving squirty cream and a plastic fish-slice.) But I'd feel happier drawing a veil, really. And so let us instead recall the televisual <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eYSpIz2FjU">syrup of ipecac</a> that was BBC4's <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddUE49RPACY"><i>Agony &amp; Ecstasy</i></a>, the tsetse-fly-on-the-wall documentary in which, over the course of three hour-long episodes, English National Ballet, the well-known National Portfolio Organisation, sort-of metaphorically but sort-of almost literally rolled back on the floor, with its little betightsed legs waving in the air, and fucked itself ceaselessly, furiously and ruinously up the institutional wazoo with an unbelievably giant dildo of its own devising and manufacture. Let me help out those of you who missed the series by offering a brief summary of each of the three episodes. In episode 1, preparations for <i>Swan Lake </i>were going tits-up and celebrated choreographer Derek Deane was revealed to be an absolutely gargantuan douchebag. In episode 2, preparations for <i>Romeo &amp; Juliet </i>were going tits-up and several of the corps sadly had to be put down after becoming injured in the fray. In episode 3, preparations for <i>The Nutcracker </i>were going tits-up and acclaimed artistic director Wayne Eagling was revealed to be the most unbelievably pathetic and ludicrous wanknugget. If only Simone "The BNP Ballerina" Clarke had still been, as she was until 2007, one of the company's principal dancers, then maybe this PR disaster could have been averted: she surely would have presented a more sympathetic public face. As it was, one could only look on in an admixture of sorrow, fear, and a profound sense of double incontinence, as the company pursued with such singleness of purpose its mission to make apparent to the nation exactly why it deserved to continue to be subsidised to the tune of well over £6m a year. Giant dildos don't grow on trees, do they. (No, Chris, they don't.)<br /><br />N.B. In the interests of transparency I should say that all of the above is specifically designed to stop you thinking about <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2011/jun/07/open-house-christopher-goode">this fucking picture of me</a> looking like a freshly lobotomized Hasidic lumberjack. Easily the worst thing that's ever happened, not just this year but ever, in the last 13.7 billion years (approx). There you go: fair and balanced.<br /><br /></div><br /><br /><br /><b>21</b>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Probably everyone -- but perhaps especially the queers in the house -- can remember their teenage experiences of getting <i>intensely </i>hot and bothered when reading what the book clubs on the back page of the TV Times used to call 'Caution: Erotica - for adults only'. The books you have to put down because you can't breathe any more. (Frank Moorhouse's <a href="http://www.middlemiss.org/lit/authors/moorhousef/everlasting.html"><i>The Everlasting Secret Family</i></a> springs to mind. Even the thought of that book can still give me an attack of proper Edwardian vapours.) The publications that seem to be emitting a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1KUoS3mmvM">Ready-Brek glow</a> from inside your bag. It's a sensation that seems to dissipate with age and experience -- particularly now one no longer has to take books and magazines to a cash desk and more-or-less announce in public that one <i>wants</i> them -- and now I'm remembering the mortifying to-do in Waterstone's when my chosen copy of <i><a href="http://www.gaytoday.com/garchive/entertain/120798en.htm">The Best Gay Superstars 1998</a> </i>turned out not to have a barcode on it -- but instead can go from one year to the next only ever disclosing one's deepest desires to Amazon or whoever. And I miss it, sometimes, I miss that feeling of hotness and jeopardy. Thank heaven, then, for the lovely Frank Jaffe and Luke Munson, two naughty boys in Florida who this summer released issue 1 of their splendidly named queer zine <i><a href="http://pleasesodomize.tumblr.com/"><b>Please, You Will Sodomize Me?!?</b></a> </i>Not since I picked up my first issue of the legendary <i><a href="http://www.holytitclamps.com/">Holy Titclamps</a> </i>at Tower Records Piccadilly in about 1996 have I held in my hands a slim volume with such an incendiary feel. The morning my copy was delivered I took it with me to read on the train but then found that I really couldn't bring myself to take it out of my work bag for fear that, like phosphorus, it (or I) might actually catch fire were it exposed to the air. This is already, I think, a brilliant achievement on the part of Jaffe and Munson. How does this thing get to be such a hot potato? No secret, really: it's just that perfect combination of smart, porny, creative, uncompromising, and radically blaringly queer. (And that subtle little trickle of cum running down the chin of our cover star certainly plays its part.) As the editors say in their splendid introduction: "<i>Please, You Will Sodomize Me?!? </i>wants to stick out like a sore erection..." Well boys, mission accomplished. This first issue has interviews with the brilliant <a href="http://gioblackpeter.com/">Gio Black Peter</a> and the inspirational <a href="http://www.heartkore.nl/">Koes Staassen</a>; there's a featurette on Gregg Araki's <i>Nowhere</i>; there's some great writing by Munson including a bravura prose work called <i>Extreme Unction</i>; and there are a bunch of pictures ranging from the cheerfully explicit outwards. Nothing I've held in my hands this year -- at least nothing that didn't <i>actually</i> have a pulse -- has throbbed harder. Apparently issue 2 is in the pipeline. Lord have mercy.<br /><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-anWhkDYQRSQ/TvpuAIOF5qI/AAAAAAAADc8/dI3gIgpn5Fk/s1600/please.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-anWhkDYQRSQ/TvpuAIOF5qI/AAAAAAAADc8/dI3gIgpn5Fk/s400/please.jpg" width="263" /></a></div><br /><br /><br /><b>22</b>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Abrupt change of pace! This is one of those breathtaking videos that make me not after all want to throw away the whole internet and start over: <i><b>Murmuration</b> </i>by Sophie Windsor Clive does what the web does best by capturing something real and personal and local and serendipitous and then sharing that record with anyone and everyone who wants it. It's interesting, too, how strong the political import of this clip is <a href="http://globalyodel.com/yodel/murmuration/">for its makers</a>.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="320" mozallowfullscreen="" src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/31158841?title=0&amp;byline=0&amp;portrait=0" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="400"></iframe></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />With thanks to @deldridgewriter for tweeting it in the first place.</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><b>23</b>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; At one point -- on the occasion of the fourth or fifth deferral notice from Amazon -- I began to wonder if Violette's much-delayed <a href="http://www.violetteeditions.com/books/new_forthcoming/Michael_Clark.html"><i><b>Michael Clark</b></i></a> would ever actually be published. In September, after the best part of two years, it finally was, and ever since it's been a shoo-in for Big Sexy Coffeetable Book of the Year. It's a fantastic compendium of images (and some patchily worthwhile accompanying texts) from across the history of Clark's work, and I particularly like it for doing both the things I kind of wanted it to do: it makes sense of the trajectory of the work over time, and it also makes it (to my mind) surpassingly clear that the best of Clark's work was done before the end of the 80s. I imagine this is exactly as it should be: if his present work and aesthetic were still hanging on to the tone and gestures of the post-punk stuff, it might now look (unintentionally) ridiculous, and maybe the trading of youthful ebullience for mature refinement is anyway in itself important or has produced work that is important to some people (even if it's not so much to me). Whatever, it's right that young, dizzyingly talented, gleefully unorthodox talents should burst on to the scene and shake everything up, and right that that's the period of their work that we might most cherish, and I suppose I just wonder if it's right that a theatre maker not far off 40 should feel, perhaps self-deludingly, that their early, youthful, ebullient work might still be ahead of them.<br /><br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-KpPu6VV4UAg/Tvis1Zd4IOI/AAAAAAAADcA/1_2T15L4sAU/s1600/michael_clark_02.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="332" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-KpPu6VV4UAg/Tvis1Zd4IOI/AAAAAAAADcA/1_2T15L4sAU/s400/michael_clark_02.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A spread from <i>Michael Clark </i>(Violette Editions)</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><br /><b>24</b>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Without wishing, in the midst of this already plenty-long post, to produce after all the Furtive 50 that in a pissy huff I earlier announced I wasn't going to do, perhaps we might forgive ourselves for taking a last gambol through the headlines. The #1 record of the 2011 intake would have been the James Blake album, which probably on balance I did think was the best release of the year, though not perhaps the most interesting to write about or the most surprising to mention, given that for a while there it seemed to be so universally acclaimed and ubiquitous as to recall past supercool epoch-owners like Portishead's <i>Dummy </i>or whatever. So let's talk about some other things. I liked how many of the records in the higher reaches of the 50 were solo women or female-fronted bands: Jenny Hval's stunning <i>Viscera </i>at #2, Rachael Dadd at #3, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ1LI-NTa2s">Tune-Yards</a> at #4, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LJtMrhb558&amp;ob=av2e">Austra at #6</a> (their <i>Feel It Break </i>was probably the album I played most all year, and the one which stuck most insistently in my head). Perhaps my favourite record of the year for just putting on and having fun listening to (which is apparently something that the kids still do, after all this time and despite their <i>Snoopy Tennis </i>Game 'n' Watches and their Pez thingummies) was the joyous racket of <i>Ma Vie Banale Avant-Garde </i>by <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_g6HwgspMA">AIDS Wolf</a>, which I placed at #11. I could have filled several spaces on the chart with the year's releases from <a href="http://www.anothertimbre.com/">Another Timbre</a>, the Sheffield-based improv/new composition label -- I chose Michael Pisaro's <i>Fields Have Ears </i>to stand in for all of them; for slightly more mainstream jazz my top picks were the ebullient live set <i>The Coimbra Concert </i>from Mostly Other People Do The Killing (featuring the consistently astounding trumpeter Peter Evans) and Austin (son of Stacy) Peralta's variable but intermittently exhilarating <i>Endless Planets</i>. Among the year's Interesting Men, I rated highly <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B22EVG7wsMQ">John Maus</a> at #14, Tom Vek at #20, the adorable Connan Mockasin at #35 and the even more adorable <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4w7lKbrZc4">Bigott</a> at #50. As usual I was out of my depth with the year's hip hop releases, and by liking <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXahuQhadV4">Childish Gambino</a>'s <i>Camp </i>as much as I did I surely showed myself up yet againas a sucker for yucky inauthentic stuff with a depressing appeal to cosy middle-class boys like myself -- see also (to a lesser extent) Das Racist, Shabazz Palaces, Beans etc., all of whom also popped up on the chart; but then again, is Kanye really 'authentic' either? There were some old-timers up there worth thanking our stars for, especially the valedictorian Glen Campbell, but also the still up-for-it Peter Murphy, the never-really-up-for-it-but-cool-anyway Harold Budd, and the still-crazy-after-all-these-years Van Der Graaf Generator, who returned with a concept album about maths. I'm also struck by how many records I was impressed by this year that I also found quite irritating, especially Seth Horvitz's brilliant but sporadically unbelievably annoying <i>Eight Studies for Automatic Piano</i>, and Tupolev's strange and hard-to-love but impossible-to-dismiss <i>Towers of Sparks</i>. But I guess if I had to recommend just one album from the year on the basis that you might not have come across it and you won't have heard anything quite like it before, I'd strongly urge you to seek out a fascinating record called <i>As A Hovering Insect Mass Breaks Your Fall </i>by <a href="http://www.straydogarmy.co.uk/jb/"><b>James Brewster</b></a>. Actually you might have heard stuff that sounds a bit like <i>a bit of it</i> before -- Múm, Richard Youngs, David Sylvian, Jónsi, Claire Hamill, Eyeless in Gaza, Pet Shop Boys, Robin Williamson, The Ecstasy of St Theresa, Durutti Column, Schlammpeitziger, Cody, Hafler Trio... -- but I bet you've never heard someone trying to push all those buttons in one go, let alone basically succeeding. It's a formidably eccentric album, sometimes difficult but never inaccessible -- in fact you never really feel like you've strayed too far from a vision of a kind of leftfield pop. There's also something curiously English about it, given that it apparently draws on or folds in ideas from Scandinavia and Eastern Europe. Actually it conjures a place that seems vividly familiar but also totally fictional: you don't feel uncomfortable there, but nor do you (and nor does Brewster) ever get settled. I'm not even sure it's a successful record, in a sense, but in another sense it clearly is because I keep going back to it, and I've given it a lot of close listens without ever feeling that I was really getting to know it. So, let that be my recommendation above all, and if you give it a try, let me know how you get on.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="328" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/tHZ293sH7vg?rel=0" width="440"></iframe></div><br /><br />p.s. Directly below this post -- but you'll probably have to click on 'Older posts' (or alternatively you could just click <a href="http://beescope.blogspot.com/2011/12/this-is-little-placeholder-for-kind-of.html">here</a>) you'll find the 2011 Thompson's Wall Of Sound -- tracks from some of the above-mentioned albums, and some other favourite music from the past year. Not all of it will suit all palates, but there should be something for everyone. By which I mostly mean, there's a Duran Duran cover by William Shatner, and if that's not good enough then frankly, fish fiddle de dee.<br /><br /><b><br /></b><br /><b><br /></b><br /><b></b><br /><b>25</b>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; You could easily spend fifty years trawling the world and its environs in search of Things And Stuff, and never once come across any Thing as lovely, any Stuff so delightful, as <a href="http://www.drawastickman.com/"><b>Draw A Stickman</b></a>. Oh, you've probably played with it already -- and, fair enough, it doesn't repay particularly extended or repeated engagement, it's too constrained and controlling for that -- but I do remember my first meeting with it, and the genuine childlike glee I experienced as a result: particularly when (SPOILER ALERT) its analysis of my drawing was acute enough that when I drew a stickman with a big body and tiny little legs, it took absolutely ages for my guy to walk anywhere. Doing a drawing that comes to life must be one of those archetypal childhood fantasies that never goes away -- it just gets forgotten about, until it's reactivated. Much clapping and cheering to all concerned.<br /><br /><br /><br /><b>26</b>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The work of <b><a href="http://www.rajnishah.com/">Rajni Shah</a> </b>-- here I'm thinking particularly of the stage-based performance work, I guess, rather than the less constructed and matrixed interventions -- often attempts to do something quite particular and distinctive and to my mind rather admirable: which is to effect a synthesis between the vocabulary and syntax and, one might say, 'manners' of live art, and the direct, unironic personal emotivity of truly mainstream pop-cultural formats, in the service of a relational practice that is both accessible and challenging -- often most challenging to those cultural gatekeepers who are most used to being 'challenged' by 'challenging' work -- and adaptable to the special tasks of provisional community-making and grassroots activism. On paper this sounds like a hybrid that it's obviously worth pursuing, and yet the clashes of register and the cross-currents of authority are so tricky to negotiate that the effect can sometimes be like mixing orange juice and milk. It seems that's how some audience members found Rajni's <i>Glorious</i>, a piece that's both self-evidently a musical and also, at least to begin with, not-a-musical, in just the same way that the brain and eye will emphatically reject what's actually there in an encounter with an optical illusion, even after the literal truth has been pointed out a hundred times. It's even a musical "in three acts"! Not even three-act plays have three acts any more! In the end I was truly grateful to Rajni and her many collaborators for <i>Glorious</i> because it needed so much from me and also so little. It just needed me to meet it. It had no use for my baggage, my critical armoury, my metropolitanism, my defences, my ideological apparatus, my learned scepticism. It needed me to meet it without all that stuff, but with open arms and no malice aforethought. And, man, that took a while to tune into. (Maddy Costa <a href="http://statesofdeliquescence.blogspot.com/2011/04/some-glorious.html">beautifully describes</a> a similar trajectory of response.) I thought I wanted more, wanted faster, wanted more obviously complex... But I didn't. I just needed a bit of time to let go of my fear of the radiant goodness of the piece -- the generosity of its conception, the flair of its execution, the elan of its openness. It's so rare to see a theatre work that's this radically disarming. And as we lay down our arms, the last thing we cling to, possibly -- I mean I suspect this is so -- is a slight distaste at the self-appointment of the lead artist, the fact that this process begins with someone standing up in front of us and being willing -- or actively wishing -- to be the element in the mix around which everything else orbits. (I suspect we find this particularly hard when it's a young woman.) It is brave to want things in the way Rajni wants them, and to hold the line when through your own agency they start to happen. Recalling her, immobile, centre stage, the focus of all these people's attention and fear and anxiety and some of these people's goodwill, I am once again reminded of my favourite Edward Lear limerick, which concerns an <a href="http://www.edward-lear.com/Deeside.htm">Old Man of Deeside</a>, who wears such an enormous hat that, as with all Lear's hat-wearers (see also the Quangle-Wangle) everyone surely thinks he's a freak, a weirdo, a creature of the fringes. And then it starts to hail, and everyone huddles under the brim of his hat. And suddenly he's at the centre of it all, bringing the gift of shelter. This Old Man, I think, is an artist after Rajni Shah's heart.<br /><br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-VQxx2qUvBPw/TvjIwXs4NTI/AAAAAAAADcY/DIi_fWp_tq8/s1600/glorious-creator-rajni-shah-424920637.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="260" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-VQxx2qUvBPw/TvjIwXs4NTI/AAAAAAAADcY/DIi_fWp_tq8/s400/glorious-creator-rajni-shah-424920637.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Rajni Shah</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><br /><br /><b>27</b>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; For at least the third year running, I think most of the really great live music events I've attended this year have been at <a href="http://cafeoto.co.uk/">Cafe Oto</a> in Dalston, one of my favourite venues anywhere. (Wish they'd revert to programming a bit more poetry, but why would they, I guess.) Shoji Haino split opinions (i.e. got on some nerves -- but not mine, or at least, not in a bad way) in the company of Paul Dunmall and John Edwards; Christian Marclay tore up the place in skittish consort with Steve Beresford and Phil Minton; Stephan Mathieu did that overwhelming thing he does which is a bit like getting stuck in an astral lift; and my dear chum Susanna Ferrar essayed a quite ravishing extempore violin concerto with the London Improvisers Orchestra, with the warm and witty conduction of Alison Blunt guiding and supporting her all the way; and Steve Roden blew my mind, and Jonny's too, with the patient and expansive materialist detail of his domestic minimalism: revelation after revelation, like having just arrived on a new planet where all the weather's strange. Certainly the most nakedly exciting thing I heard there -- or pretty much anywhere -- all year, though, was <a href="http://www.markfell.com/wiki/"><b>Mark Fell</b></a>, whose recent flurry of albums had tickled me enough to make me want to go along, but had nowhere near prepared me for the casual enormity of what Fell does live. As the set went on, it gradually yielded -- as if under interrogation at customs -- more and more of its initially obscured origins in a kind of multilated house music. It retains the logics of house, its builds and drops and sustained horizontality, as well as some of its local colour (the synthetic handclap, hooray!, rehabilitated at last for the armchair boffin), but twists them into confounding patterns that appear at their lower reaches to be insisting you're in a perfectly foursquare environment while at every moment further up the image asymmetric beats chop and lope and push and pull your brain into weird Mobius balloon animals. All this being done by a dude in a cap who looks like he's just come downstairs on a Sunday morning to find himself in a strange house, with no recollection of how he got there, and is passing the time playing <i>Sonic &amp; Sega All-Stars Racing</i> until his memory comes back. This track from last year's <i>Multistability </i>on Raster-Noton gives you some idea, if you play it loud enough, but it seems possible that, for now, it's in live contexts that Fell really hits home.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/D7xLCdJj4a4?rel=0" width="420"></iframe></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><br /><br /><b>28</b>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; While I was doing research (I know that's immediately going to look like "doing research, ha ha", but I really was doing research) for the Queer DIY blog, I came across -- I think via <a href="http://thedarklore.tumblr.com/">Frank Jaffe's blog</a> -- the Tumblr of an anonymous young guy who called his space <b>n00dzblog</b>. He was posting a series of erotic/pornographic (individual sand-lines will vary) self-portraits, using different kinds of personas or references to queer types and tropes; and they were really great, let's say that to begin with, they were really fucking amazing in fact. But there was an additional and fascinating paradox at work in them too, in that they were pretty full-on in terms of what was shown, but the maker had lightly pixellated his face, supposedly in response to being recognized by someone at his school. So they were great pictures but they also captured an interesting problem, an essentially political problem about the will to self-disclosure and self-identification and the borders of the permission we give ourselves in pursuing those aims. On first encountering n00dzblog, I grabbed a couple of images that I thought might be useful for my own project blog, and figured I'd go back the following day and download everything else on the site. Which I did: only, a couple of the images that I thought I'd remembered didn't seem to be there any more; and then I hit refresh and, rather than those lost images returning, even more disappeared: and I realised with a kind of jolt of horror that the owner-operator of n00dzblog was deleting all the images, right now in this moment, while I was trying to download them all. So, essentially, we raced each other (and I later managed to find a few fills where his images had been reposted on other blogs). By the end of the day, all that was left at n00dzblog -- and even this, now, is gone -- was a note that I found genuinely sad: "im tired of being slutty and posting explicit pictures of myself. thats not me and i don't want anyone to think of me like that . . . i am not an object and this is me taking a stand against that...". It was hard to think through the statement partly because it was difficult to accept its face value: only the previous day, he'd been posting incredible (and incredibly popular) pictures of himself, that were conceived with great generosity and executed with enormous skill and flair, and so, for all that one could understand his not wanting to be seen <i>only</i> as a maker of explicit self-pics, it clearly wasn't <i>wholly</i> true either that "thats not me": he'd obviously been expressing at least an aspect of himself, and doing so with such great courage and with such a reliable eye for his own beauty that I was genuinely upset about whatever had happened to make him change his mind. Maybe he got busted again, I thought -- someone close to him found out what he was doing and gave him a talking to (it certainly sounds to me like someone else's language being parroted). But mostly I dearly wanted to be able to talk back to him about what it means to be, and to choose to be, an <i>object </i>(sometimes) -- in the way that actors are objects: not reduced to the status of inanimate junk without human feelings and capacities, but released into the profoundly beautiful state of being <i>willing to be seen</i>, being open to the readings, the interpretations, the distortions maybe, of other people's desirous subjective projections on to you. It's not an easy state to enter, and there are plenty of successful actors who will never, ever fully achieve it; in those who do, it instils a kind of grace that I think is among the most exact and most powerful expressions of presence <i>within</i> art. ...But that's not the kind of comment that generally gets traded around online spaces like n00dzblog. Whatever -- I hope he knows how great he is, and, "slutty" or not, how exemplary was the refinement of his self-staging performances, the record of which he was so kind, even briefly, to share. -- I've thought pretty hard about including one of the pictures with this paragraph, as an illustration, and in the end I decided I would indeed use one, though probably the least explicit image out of everything I harvested. This might be seen as a grossly disrespectful overriding of his obvious wishes not to have these pictures circulate any more; but given that they're still so multiply present in the public domain anyway, I can't see it being additionally harmful, and anyway I slightly want to hope that in doing so I might manage to summon him here, and maybe he'll read this paragraph, and be reassured that his first instinct was right: that his pictures were beautiful, and generous, and true to themselves: and whoever told him otherwise was speaking -- sincerely, no doubt -- from an unreliable position of private fear.<br /><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-87wB3XHXjJA/Tvt7ze8QP3I/AAAAAAAADdI/LDGBUdz_Jtk/s1600/tumblr_lrn7fnm5Du1r3q545o1_500.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-87wB3XHXjJA/Tvt7ze8QP3I/AAAAAAAADdI/LDGBUdz_Jtk/s400/tumblr_lrn7fnm5Du1r3q545o1_500.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><br /><br /><br /><b>29</b>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Well so you'll be wanting to know what's the best room I've been in all year. (As if it were any of your damn business.) I guess the obvious, and in some respects the correct, answer is <a href="http://sitroom.blogspot.com/">The Situation Room</a>, which even on a relatively quiet year -- quiet at least in terms of public events and productive work -- still seethes with a sense of possibilities waiting to be explored. Also, the new Bush theatre auditorium is I think an absolute triumph and I felt very lucky to be walking around it and working in it, especially at the even more exciting stage where the last of it was still being built. But actually this category's slipped in simply so that I can mention, mostly for the benefit of my own memory, the upstairs room at the awesome <a href="http://www.mjt.org/">Museum of Jurassic Technology</a> in Culver City, Los Angeles, containing the display called <b><i><a href="http://www.mjt.org/recentaddtions/creatures.html">The Lives of Perfect Creatures:</a> The Dogs of the Soviet Space Program</i></b>. Inside is a small collection of specially-commissioned portraits in oils of five of the dogs who were sent into space by the Russians between 1957 (Laika, the most famous of the doggy cosmonauts, on Sputnik 2) and 1966 (Ugolyok, who spent 22 days in space and came back apparently unharmed). It's an extraordinarily beautiful display, and deeply moving -- perhaps all the more so because I only got to spend a few very brief moments in there -- and fascinating in the tone it sets: it seems so hearteningly serious not <i>despite</i> but in part <i>because of</i> its being slightly kitsch -- bestowing these portraits on the dogs is in a way a perfect mirror of what it meant to send those animals into space in the first place, a category error ennabled by the speechlessness of the para-erotic gap between two discontinuous species. Seeing these portraits tells us so much about ourselves, and so terribly little about the experiences of the dogs.<br /><br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-6cWBD2zBm3w/TvneSKy9eWI/AAAAAAAADck/d3R11mES2oc/s1600/04kino-450.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-6cWBD2zBm3w/TvneSKy9eWI/AAAAAAAADck/d3R11mES2oc/s400/04kino-450.jpg" width="397" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Portrait of Laika, by M.A. Peers</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><br /><br /><b>30</b>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; A quick run-through of the best small-scale performance I saw this year might sensibly begin with the very smallest (and quickest) -- and also perhaps the biggest in terms of immediate impact and the decay time of its reverberations: a fleeting one-to-one, not much more than a turbulent constructed act of seeing, this was Laura Lima's 'Men = flesh / Women = flesh - FLAT', as part of <i><a href="http://mif.co.uk/event/11-roomsbr-group-show/">11 Rooms</a> </i>at the Manchester International Festival, and much the most successful of the pieces in that show, I thought, though genuinely troubling both in concept and in practice. A far more benignly unsettling experience was to be had at Edgelands, where Alex Kelly set up his <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/compassliveart/6521497265/"><i>Inspiration Exchange</i></a>, a project I'd heard about and seen documentation of but never directly experienced in action; I love the shapes of Alex's work and thinking, and one of the new bits of information I came away with (regarding a 6B pencil) has already passed through me to several new carriers. Edgelands of course also presented the opportunity, which I was delighted to take, to see Kieran Hurley's <i>Hitch </i>again: but I think <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2011/jul/17/best-performance-chris-goode">I've probably said enough on that topic already</a>. Elsewhere in Edinburgh, Greg McLaren's <i>Doris Day Can Fuck Off </i>was a full-blooded gift of a show, loving and reckless and imploring and bracingly odd; while In Short Productions made a nifty job of David Greig's terrific <i>Yellow Moon</i>, thanks not least to a brace of <i>incredible</i> performances from Helen Cooper and Kyle Major in the central roles of Leila and Lee. But I think my Smallish Piece Of The Year would have to be <a href="http://www.melaniewilson.org.uk/"><b>Melanie Wilson</b></a>'s beautifully conceived, stunningly realized <i><a href="http://www.fueltheatre.com/projects/autobiographer">Autobiographer</a>. </i>I saw a very early showing, at QMUL, and I dare say it's grown even futher since then, but I was blown away, as I always am, by Melanie's compositional skills, her flawless creation of structures (physical, textual and especially sonic) one can walk around in thought, bringing the fullness -- and sometimes the sparseness -- of one's own experience to the work, and finding a sympathetic space for it there. What could have been a heavy, sombre piece -- tracing as it did the taking-hold of Alzheimers -- was light, witty and deeply affecting; and the show contains also the most astonishing <i>coup de theatre</i> I've witnessed in ages, a moment that was genuinely gaspingly strange and almost chilling, but at the same time serenely and expansively beautiful.<br /><br /><br /><div style="border: 2px solid black; padding: 2em;"><br /><b>Interlude #3: "I SEE DEAD PEOPLE"</b><br /><br /><i>Here are some fine folks who left us in 2011, in some cases with little reverse-fanfare, having endeared themselves to us by (a) distinguishing themselves superlatively in their respective fields of endeavour, and by (b) not being Christopher Hitchens, that neocon pin-up rapscallion and fuckspanner.</i><br /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b>Milton Babbitt </b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="328" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/gbzw8VNkA5o?rel=0" width="440"></iframe></div><div style="text-align: center;">&nbsp;Composition for Synthesizer (1961)</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b>&nbsp;Lena Nyman</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="328" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/gVqa05chzT4?rel=0" width="440"></iframe></div><div style="text-align: center;">&nbsp;Trailer for <i>I Am Curious - Yellow</i> (dir. NAME, 1967)</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b>Andrew Gold </b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="328" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/iCOS2vOxuXE?rel=0" width="440"></iframe></div><div style="text-align: center;">&nbsp;'Lonely Boy' (1977)</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b>Michael Gough </b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="328" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/qKJkBGfznFo?rel=0" width="440"></iframe></div><div style="text-align: center;">as Bertrand Russell in <i>Wittgenstein</i> (dir. Derek Jarman, 1993)</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b>Johnny Pearson</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="328" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/p41_M_mehG0?rel=0" width="440"></iframe></div><div style="text-align: center;">'Heavy Action' (1974)</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b>Dennis Oppenheim</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="248" mozallowfullscreen="" src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/11898358?title=0&amp;byline=0&amp;portrait=0" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="441"></iframe></div><div style="text-align: center;">extract from <i>Uncontrolled Unstoppable Motion </i>(documentary on Dennis Oppenheim) (dir. Barbara Andriano, 2005)</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b>Billy Bang</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="253" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/f31LzBg_jwI?rel=0" width="440"></iframe></div><div style="text-align: center;">Billy Bang Trio at Tokyo Jazz Circuit, 2010</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b>Russell Hoban</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/dK7-K9dAIkQ?rel=0" width="420"></iframe></div><div style="text-align: center;">from interview with Dee Palmer, ICA London, 1987</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b>Darryl Pandy</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="328" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Lr-OgG1A74c?rel=0" width="440"></iframe></div><div style="text-align: center;">Farley 'Jackmaster' Funk feat. Darryl Pandy, 'Love Can't Turn Around' (1986)</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b>Gill Clarke</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="328" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/mBRjDuu3hnA?rel=0" width="440"></iframe></div><div style="text-align: center;">Gill teaching</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b>David Bedford</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="253" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/7Ve_58Ds9hM?rel=0" width="440"></iframe></div><div style="text-align: center;">'Sad And Lonely Faces' (1972)</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b>Samuel Menashe</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="253" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/EefUhL2kHkM?rel=0" width="440"></iframe></div><div style="text-align: center;">'Samuel, the Concise Poet', episode of <i>Know Your Neighbor</i> (2009)</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b>Smiley Culture</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="328" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/eDze57fNoZI?rel=0" width="440"></iframe></div><div style="text-align: center;">'Shan a Shan' (1985)</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b>N.F. Simpson</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="328" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/S8-fQZr3iyE?rel=0" width="440"></iframe></div><div style="text-align: center;">excerpt from N.F. Simpson's <i>One Way Pendulum</i> (dir. Peter Yates, 1964)</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b>Gilbert Adair</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="253" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/YU1brBVMBkM?rel=0" width="440"></iframe></div><div style="text-align: center;">Trailer for <i>The Dreamers</i> (dir. Bernardo Bertolucci, 2003), screenplay by Gilbert Adair</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b>Cy Twombly</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="328" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/m_WgCo-Mqg4?rel=0" width="440"></iframe></div><div style="text-align: center;">The Lepanto Cycle (2001) at Museum Brandhorst, Munich</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b>Fran Landesman</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="328" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/p-u9UScywHE?rel=0" width="440"></iframe></div><div style="text-align: center;">Ed Ames, 'Ballad of the Sad Young Men' (1966) lyrics: Fran Landesman</div><br /></div><br /><br /><br /><br /><b>31</b>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; As post after post on this blog can be seen to attest, I properly properly *heart* <b>Robert Popper </b>and<b> Peter Serafinowicz</b>, the geniuses behind <i>Look Around You </i>and much besides. So here's something by each of them that made me smile this year: firstly, Popper as his wincingly funny wind-up <i>alter ego</i> Robin Cooper putting in a call to 118 118 (the clip is a few years old but I only came across it recently so I'm going to stick it in here, and hang the rules!);&nbsp; and then, from Serafinowicz, a proposed advert for KFC. When Michael Billington recently opined that <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2011/dec/14/a-for-absurdism-modern-theatre?INTCMP=SRCH">absurdism had no claim to contemporary relevance</a>, I thought immediately of Popper and Serafinowicz, who so frequently and with such laboratory care nudge the mundane and familiar just enough to tilt it into a strange and often out-and-out disturbing light; as absurd (and quintessentially absurdist) as anything in Ionesco or N.F. Simpson, it is work that titters on the edge of an abyss.<br /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"></div><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="253" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/5MCmqJXd33U?rel=0" width="440"></iframe></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="253" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/QmMtIG0St64?rel=0" width="440"></iframe></div><br /><br /><br /><b>32</b>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; At the risk of sounding sucky-uppy, I wanted quickly to say something about <a href="http://www.ovalhouse.com/"><b>Ovalhouse</b></a>. When I went down to Oval House (back in the day when it was two words) in March for the queer D&amp;D satellite, I was very struck by how different it felt from the last time I'd been there. There was a palpable sense of energy and engagement and of the blinds suddenly being open. And when I wrote to thank the new joint artistic directors, Rachel Briscoe and Rebecca Atkinson-Lord, for their hospitality to that event, they invited me in for a chat, and eight months later, I've just started making a show for them that will open in February. I feel very fortunate that I seem to have been (for once) ahead of the curve in terms of people figuring out how exceptionally good Atkinson-Lord and Briscoe are, and how refreshed and optimistic the venue now feels (to an outsider like me, anyway), and how rapidly the place is going to shift both in the ecology of London (and national) theatre and in the estimation of those who are paying attention. The season of queer work that my piece will be a part of looks like a terrific selection box of voices and styles; Ovalhouse hasn't junked any of its valuable and longstanding commitments, but it has rebooted them in a spirit of expanded vision, renewed confidence and <i>more fun</i>. At the end of 2011 things look more interesting across the London fringe than they have in a while: the <a href="http://www.stkinternational.co.uk/STK/STK.html">Stoke Newington International Airport</a> collective are beautifully in their stride; Brian Logan and Jenny Paton are just the right helmspersons for the next chapter in the continuing shaggy dog story of <a href="http://www.cptheatre.co.uk/">Camden People's Theatre</a>; and a little further downstream it will be fascinating to watch Chris Haydon and Madani Younis put their respective stamps on the Gate and the Bush. I'm only sorry (in a thwarted sort of way, let's be honest) that rather than transferring into new hands on the departure of the present leadership, the Drill Hall is being subsumed into RADA. What a waste. I started my conversation with Ovalhouse by saying that I, like so many indie theatre makers, have no obvious home in London, no sustained relationship with a single small/midscale venue whose express remit is presenting, developing, and being an advocate for, work of that stripe, and whose energies, critical insights and governance (and, I suppose, funding) are equal to such a programme. For myself -- as various short-falling job applications over the past eighteen months appear to indicate -- I seem to be too old now to be considered for the interesting smaller spaces, and when I'm old enough for the bigger institutions (any minute now) I won't have anything like the experience most Boards of Trustees will be looking for. People ask me all the time if I'd like to run a building again, and the answer is always yes; but I begin to wonder if the only way this will ever happen is if I bite the far-from-soft-centred bullet and start something from scratch. Which is, actually, realistic considerations aside, a fun thought: but for the moment, CG&amp;Co is plenty to be working (and playing) with.<br /><br /><br /><br /><b>33</b>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; In this year of what one collaborator has already started referring to as my "prod from God", perhaps it's appropriate that I should have seen not one but two live performances of the <i><b>St Matthew Passion</b>.</i> I thought <a href="http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/66121/productions/st-matthew-passion.html">Jonathan Miller's staging at the NT</a> was interesting, though a little underpowered: his thoughtful naturalism just doesn't reach the excesses of the story of Christ -- people pottering about with their hands in their pockets, like a melancholic Gap advert, can't make sense of anything: which is perhaps exactly the point, and I can see the problem Miller's trying to solve but I suspect the answer is not to give the piece a makeover in smart-casual beige so as to bring it closer to the everyday, but rather to raise the audience up so that we have no choice but to look God in the eye, or to avert our gaze and to live out the drama and the social meaning of that aversion; really, the Passion should be so daunting, so demanding as to dwarf <i>King Lear</i> -- let alone the pastel normalities (and whose normalities are they, anyway?) of Miller's production. So I guess I'd say I was more taken with the extremely fine Bach Choir performance at the RFH, an annual Easter fixture there. One could have wished for a sexier, more radically compelling Jesus, than Jeremy White; but otherwise the soloists were excellent, above all the extraordinary Iestyn Davies. And above all, this <i>St Matthew Passion</i> had a surprise in store: sudden illness forced James Gilchrist, who up to that point had been a remarkably committed and engaging Evangelist, to leave the stage three-quarters of the way through, and with no one in a position to step in for him, the remainder of the piece could only be presented in excerpts -- with the exceptionally curious outcome that Jesus cheated death. And not in the usual close-your-eyes-and-count-to-three-days way. I mean he simply didn't die on the cross. It was a peculiar turn of events, a bit like watching the thousandth replay of a famous goal and the ball suddenly going wide: but I must say, I was not unpleased that, just this once, Christ got off scot-free. Narrow Escape Of The Year, by a mile. Run, Jesus, run!<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><b>34</b>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Let's round up some more art, shall we? The year's highlights for me included two hugely stimulating major shows at the Barbican: <a href="http://www.barbican.org.uk/artgallery/event-detail.asp?ID=11398"><i>Laurie Anderson, Trisha Brown, Gordon Matta-Clark: Pioneers of the Downtown Scene, New York 1970s</i></a>, which offered a wonderful, richly contextualised opportunity to come closer to two artists (Brown and Matta-Clark) who are too often relegated to lists of (basically) 'people who used to be important', and also to see a good range of Anderson's pre-<i>United States </i>work -- in the case of all three artists, there was lots here that had retained its freshness (especially Brown's still thrillingly cogent 'Man Walking Down the Side of a Building' from 1970), and tellingly it wasn't the originals but the slightly pious best-behaviour recreations of Brown's live works which made the passage of time feel as if it was looming large; and the current show <a href="http://www.barbican.org.uk/artgallery/event-detail.asp?ID=12472"><i>OMA/Progress</i></a>, which I visited once and loved but found almost immediately exhausting, so I hope to go back in the new year, not least as a way of setting up a subsequent visit to the V&amp;A's <i>Postmodernism: Style &amp; Subversion, 1970-1990</i>. Equally lively, though inevitably rather less consistently successful, was the touring <a href="http://www.britishartshow.co.uk/"><i>British Art Show 7:</i> <i>In The Days Of The Comet</i></a>, which I caught twice at the Hayward and again in the pleasingly different spaces of its Plymouth leg. It was Christian Marclay's <i>The Clock</i> and Roger Hiorns's untitled installation (park bench, sometimes on fire, sometimes watched by a naked young man, sometimes not -- you might have seen it on the BAS7 poster) that caught most of the popular attention -- and why not?, they're two beautifully accomplished pieces; but there was plenty more to enjoy and to think about, including some coolly involving paintings by Maaike Shoorel and Milena Dragicevic, Haroon Mirza's complex and poignant Ian Curtis-related installation <i>Regaining a Degree of Control</i>, and Elizabeth Price's strange and mesmerising video <i>New Ruined Institute.</i> For me though it was Hiorns's several pieces, considered as a whole, and Wolfgang Tillmans's <i>Truth Study Center</i> and <i>Freischwimmer 155 </i>taken together (or in relation to each other), that continued to reverberate long after the gallery visits. Among the smaller shows, <a href="http://www.vilmagold.com/newpages/previous/charles3.htm">Charles Atlas at Vilma Gold</a>, and especially the new digital video piece <i>No Safety In Numbers</i>, drew you into a smart imaginative dialogue with an abundant queerness just beginning to tend towards abstraction; <a href="http://www.simonleegallery.com/Exhibitions/What_do_you_do_for_fun_/Exhibited_Works">Larry Clark at Simon Lee</a> was, as ever, brilliant, repulsive, funny, obnoxious, sexy, boring, a queer hero, a homophobic misogynistic creep, and frequently kind of blah: and the perpetual movement between these states made the work turn like a mobile in the heat of your confused critical attention; <a href="http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/exhibitions/fred-sandback">Fred Sandback at the Whitechapel</a> was just an out-and-out joy (my only grumble being that there wasn't more of it -- hopefully we'll see a major retrospective somewhere in the UK before too long); the group show <i>The Weaklings</i>, curated by Dennis Cooper for Five Years gallery in Hackney, was a blast -- <a href="http://beescope.blogspot.com/2011/10/arrangement-in-red-green-and-orange.html">I've written about it already</a>; and <a href="http://haunchofvenison.com/exhibitions/past/2011/giuseppe_penone/">Giuseppe Penone</a> and <a href="http://haunchofvenison.com/exhibitions/past/2011/richard_long/">Richard Long</a> made for a suggestive pairing at Haunch of Venison, though the scale of the gallery and the works on display suited Long's quiet monumentalism better, and I like Penone more, so the balance was for me a little wonky and the impositions (not least acoustic) of the location came close to being suffocating, as did the sense that it and I were on opposing sides of a class war in which the artwork was being forced into a peacekeeping role. But for the best of the smaller shows this year I'm taking us back to the Barbican for <b>Cory Arcangel</b>'s <a href="http://www.barbican.org.uk/artgallery/event-detail.asp?ID=11621"><i>Beat the Champ</i></a>. This extraordinary installation -- a time-line of home videogame consoles all hacked to play ten-pin bowling games on an endless loop of dismal <i>nul points</i> failure -- covered itself in oodles of win for the following reasons: unlike almost everything I've ever seen there, it made sense of the Curve's odd and usually annoying space; as a wall of sound and image it was perfectly scaled, more than lifesize but less than sublime and so sitting in a nimbly ambiguous relation to ideas about culture, progress, noise and the repetitiousness of wanting; most importantly it worked as a one-liner but continued to yield more and more as you stayed with it, accumulating eventually an emotional weight and a critical depth, like a slow flood of recognition. Perhaps it was my favourite single new artwork of the year because it was the one that was most like the year I was having.<br /><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="328" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/baIiP8re1y4?rel=0" width="440"></iframe></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><br /><b>35</b>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; More than one person noted that the demise of this blog seemed to coincide with a waning in general of the appetite for blogging and especially for reading other people's blogs: and I must admit that does, to some degree, reflect my own experience as a reader as well as, obviously, as a writer. But there are still some people out there who are making the blog thing work, not only for themselves but for their grateful readers too. I guess the blogs I admire above all, especially these days, are those which recognize the power of spaces where the personal -- sometimes the deeply personal -- can meet some kind of public, and a kind of conversation or cross-pollination or even some social model can stand in and grow out of that space. My dear friend <b>Julia Lee Barclay</b>'s blog <a href="http://julialeebarclay.blogspot.com/"><i>Somewhere In Transition</i></a> is exactly and exemplarily that: its candour -- sometimes gentle, sometimes fierce, often both -- is exactly its <i>raison d'etre</i>, or at least its reason to be a public space rather than a private journal: it is, among many other things, a record of a life lived in the full and sometimes unforgiving glare of a political and ethical consciousness that won't let go. For some doubtless it will sometimes read like the most uncomfortable overshare; if you're among them, you should know that the world in which that kind of pusillanimous etiquette is favoured as an invsible overlay for keeping everyone in their place is going to come under sustained attack over the next few years, and artists as brave and humane as Julia will be in the vanguard of that movement, and -- I'm saying this fondly -- you're going to end up feeling like a dick, and with good reason. For similar reasons I've greatly valued CN Lester's blog <i><a href="http://cnlester.wordpress.com/">A Gentleman and a Scholar</a> </i>for keeping me on my toes in relation to trans issues while at the same time remaining stylish, entertaining, thoughtful and superbly well-written; and it's nice keeping an eye on what's going on in my pal Chris Rowlands's head via the medium of <a href="http://krisrowland.tumblr.com/">his big-fun Tumblr</a>. And finally I wouldn't want this survey to omit <a href="http://supervalentthought.com/">...<i>Supervalent Thought</i></a>, the blog of <a href="http://english.uchicago.edu/faculty/berlant">Lauren Berlant</a>, an intoxicatingly smart American academic to whose work I was introduced this year by Theron Schmidt (no dumbkopf himself). She's posted only nine entries this year (so far) but you could live off any of them for several months, so densely nutritious are they, like intellectual astronaut food. I'm hoping sooner or later if I keep my head down I'll figure out what 'supervalent' means, and then, oh dude, we're off to the races.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><b>36</b>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; No hesitation about my 'You Just Had To Be There' Moment Of The Year. At the Sit Room launch of Timothy Thornton's very remarkable -- possibly someday seminal -- <i>Jocund Day </i>(from the excellent <a href="http://mountain-press.co.uk/">Mountain P.</a>, whose <i>Certain Prose Works of the English Intelligencer </i>looks sure to be a highlight of 2012), <a href="http://fallopianyoutube.blogspot.com/"><b>Joe Luna</b></a>, who was there (as was I) to read in acclamation of Thornton (a bit like the "coloured girls" who go do-do-do whilst bearing down on Lou Reed in all the lubricious pomp of his <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_FQeBvXdhU">feral peregrinations</a>), unexpectedly and marvellously concluded his set by reading <a href="http://www.bartleby.com/122/12.html">"The Windhover"</a> by Gerard Manley Hopkins, which is one of the greatest short poems in the English language, and anyone who says different quite frankly smells of bobbins; and not only was this surprising and titillating in itself, but he also read it <i>blindingly </i>well, as Luna so often will: and suddenly there was music and sex and modernity in it, Tom of Finland graffiti and E.T. flying with Elliott across the lit face of the moon: which is good, because there were all of those things in Gerard Manley Doodah, too, which is why he had to wear his bicycle clips so tight: and so not only were we listening to Luna, and doing proper obeisances to Thornton, and trying to catch the eye of Jonny Liron, but we were also briefly summoning Gerard Manley Whatnot and throwing him a long-overdue coming out party, and I think I <i>may</i> have ended the evening being sucked off in the warehouse lavatory by a ghost who smelled of violet creams.<br /><br /><br /><br /><b>37</b>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; I've spent a lot of this year reading with some relish the old dudes, the pantheon of Meerikan honky cats who spent the fifties and early sixties being <i>definitely on to something </i>that the bitter end of the sixties stupidly forgot in the narcissistic pall of its purple haze. First there was <a href="https://secure.pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&amp;p=222"><i>The Paul Goodman Reader</i></a>, which omits much I wish it'd found room for but is still a pretty impressive entry-level anthology for those new to Goodman's work and life and thought; then on a trip to Bristol I happened to pick up, in a bargain bookstore, the utterly delightful <i>Fuller's Earth: A Day With Buckminster Fuller and the Kids</i>, a transcript of an extended conversation between Bucky Fuller, late in life, and three children, one of whom, Monkee / Liquid Paper heir <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSgB338VfIs">Michael Nesmith</a>'s son Jonathan, comes across as so bright and appealing it's a wonder Paul Goodman wasn't waiting for him in the garden with a butterfly net; then I re-read Marcuse's <i>One-Dimensional Man</i>, which remains a really key text for me and an exciting one in many ways; and most recently I was pleased to pick up Marshall McLuhan's <i>The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects</i>, both in the recentish Penguin Modern Classics edition and, via Ubuweb, <a href="http://www.ubu.com/sound/mcluhan.html">a late 60s audio adaptation</a> -- though it's the book, more than the LP, that's most lucid in its explorations of the nonlinearity of the aural, an argument that chimes resonantly with some of what <a href="http://www.thewire.co.uk/themire/tag/drew-daniel">Drew Daniel</a>'s been saying in various places lately about the queerness of sound (precisely because it resists, or can resist, hierarchy, taxonomy, and linear ordering). All of this has been great: but if one Book By An Old Geezer has turned me on this year above all others, it's <b>Euclid's <i>Elements</i></b> -- especially in the stunning Taschen reprint of Oliver Byrne's 1847 edition, which replaces the algebraic equations of Euclid's original with bold four-colour diagrams. I haven't worked through it methodically yet -- it was a Christmas present to myself, so I'm still at the boggling stage -- but simply as a sensual entertainment, it's transcendent; and the bits of Euclid proper that I read earlier in the year, and that made me want to investigate editions of the <i>Elements </i>that I might like, were vertiginously beautiful and strangely touching. There is something about the basic propositions from which Euclid proceeds that is a bit like looking at a clutch of bird's-eggs: something objectively profound, I suppose.<br /><br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-bt45zIkNakg/TvpRz0VodAI/AAAAAAAADcw/DU24mY1iKco/s1600/tumblr_euclid.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="248" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-bt45zIkNakg/TvpRz0VodAI/AAAAAAAADcw/DU24mY1iKco/s400/tumblr_euclid.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">from Oliver Byrne's <i>Six Books of Euclid</i> (1847; Taschen facsimile, 2010)</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><br /><b>38</b>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; It seemed like pretty much everyone was excited about <b><i>Weekend</i></b> by the time it got its general release: the advance word was so good, the trailer so promising. And I, falling in line for once, was looking forward to it also -- it looked like it might be a confident, uncliched, restrained, basically realistic telling of a gay love story: and there aren't many of those to write home about. So of course one went in with a little anxiety: that it wasn't going to live up to the hype, that it wasn't going to be as honest and unvarnished and care-taking as we wanted (or even needed) it to be: and sure enough that's the slightly grumpy place in which I spent the first half hour. The real problem I had with it was that neither of the lead characters -- who, as you probably know, meet on a Friday night and become surprisingly emotionally entangled over the course of the weekend, only for it to be revealed (and this is I think hardly a spoiler) that one of the pair is leaving for the US on Sunday afternoon, and won't be back for a couple of years -- was all that likeable. In fact I thought they were both ever-so-slightly kind of annoying: which made it hard to invest very fully in the plot and in the predicament it was heading towards. Only slowly did I realise that this was the power of the film: that it was refusing yet another of the received ideas that attend most gay movies, and in fact most movies <i>period</i>: that a film, especially a talky character-driven film, is obliged to be in part an advert, selling us the likeability of its outlook and its leads (in that curious flickery-matrixed place where you see both the actor and the character overlaid in a kind of stereoscopic picture which looks and feels a lot like the three dimensions of 'roundedness') and needing us to fall in love with them in order that we may find it credible that they are loveable to each other. <i>Weekend</i> does not seem to need or want you to love, or even like, the people it's about; it asks that you empathize with them, with their situation and (to some extent) with what they represent. As soon as I realised that my role was simply to witness, to watch and listen with care and to sit with the film as a fiction and with the idea of the film as a proposition, I quickly found that I was very moved and very heartened by its self-possession and its elegance. The performances, especially by leads Chris New and Tom Cullen, actually are really great; the writing is sensitive and intelligent; and the shape of the thing is almost perfectly judged. It's an extremely grown-up film -- and there's a scene, two thirds through, where they're in bed together very early on the Sunday morning, that made me bite back sobs. I guess I should say that I think I remained a little disappointed -- and gosh, won't this sound shallow -- that it wasn't as sexually explicit as I'd heard and anticipated (though certainly it's not coy either); I wish it had gone a bit further only because the project is clearly motivated by a passion, maybe an anger even, about what we see and don't see gay men as being, or being able to be -- and in fact Cullen's character even makes exactly this point, about the visibility of queer sex in mainstream spaces. But I dare say there was some entirely proper discussion about how far you could go before the reception of the depiction of sex would overbalance the ability of audiences to see the rest of the drama. At any rate, I think <i>Weekend</i> is a beautiful film because of its integrity, its grown-upness; because its humanity rests not in its showing us radiant people doing things of cinematic loveliness, but in its allowing us to watch regular people figuring stuff out over coffee (and other recreational drugs). By not going out of its way to make that disclosure consistently palatable, it lets us see instead that it trusts us, trusts our own grown-upness and all the mess and confusion that goes along with it.<br /><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="253" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/EmlNgKlHViY?rel=0" width="440"></iframe></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><br /><b>39</b>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; I guess it was maybe eight in the morning, something like that; I, along with most of the people in the room (probably not the stage managers though), had given up trying to keep track of the time. The point is, it had been night-time for a while, and we'd all stayed up together. There in the new Bush, keeping each other company through the first 24-hour performance of the whole of <a href="http://www.bushtheatre.co.uk/sixtysix/"><i>66 Books</i></a>. There had been food breaks, and great chats with friends and strangers, and mooching in the library and the garden; and there had been plays and monologues, and plays and monologues, and an amazing gospel band, and plays and monologues -- and at some point, somewhere in the woozy hour between four and five in the morning, there had been Harold Finley's exquisite and commanding three-minute performance of Michael Rosen's <i>Amos the Shepherd Curses the Rulers of Ancient Israel</i>, which I directed and which he delivers -- as I knew he would -- with a cool imperiousness, dressed in an outfit (made by Tori Jennings) we pretty much cribbed off Maya Angelou. There had been, in total, 41 plays and monologues and other sorts of things -- but mostly plays and monologues -- by this point. And then... And then, o best beloved, there was <b>Billy Bragg</b>. Sitting on the stage, just him and his guitar, not even a microphone to keep him from us. And there was sunlight: suddenly, amazingly, coming in through the opened shutters like a message that just couldn't be kept in, there was sunlight flooding the space. And Billy Bragg sung us a song called 'Do Unto Others', which was... All right. An all-right song. And I loved that. The great Billy Bragg, a hero of mine for 25 years but someone I'd never seen live before; the amazing sunlight; a room full of woozy or post-woozy people who'd stayed up all night to keep watch together; and the beautiful adequacy, in that moment, of an all-right song. There are not many moments I've had in a theatre that I'll remember for ever, but I can't imagine forgetting that one.<br /><br /><br /><br /><b>40</b>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; And this last one comes even closer to breaking my self-imposed ordinance about not picking anything in which I was directly involved -- but it's here precisely because I <i>really wasn't</i> directly involved, that's what made it probably the Happiest Thing Of The Year. I can't remember where it began. Well, I know it was the rehearsal room at West Yorkshire Playhouse where I and four others -- Tom Frankland, James Lewis, Jonny Liron and Thero Schmidt -- spent a week making <i>Open House</i> with whoever walked through the door and said they'd like to join in. I think it was sometime on a Monday -- and maybe Gloria Lindh had something to do with it...? -- it's all a bit fuzzy I'm afraid. But at some point early in that week, somebody started making a dance. We wanted to make <b>a dance that anybody could learn</b>, that anyone could walk into the room and just pick up the moves, in ten minutes flat. Even a terpsichorean doofus like me. So maybe it started then. What I do remember is that when the amazing <a href="http://www.adad.org.uk/metadot/index.pl?iid=24428&amp;isa=Category">Pauline Mayers</a> showed up on Wednesday morning -- thinking she'd stay for an hour or so; actually she was with us for the next three days and we couldn't have done half of what we did without her -- the beginnings of a dance that were knocking aroud the room suddenly started coming together into a dance. A learnable, teachable, danceable dance. It went at the end of our first showing, that Wednesday evening, and it seemed to work; so we did it again, a little refined perhaps and with new music (or maybe the music had already changed?), on the Thursday; and by the end of our proper full-on Friday evening performance, I reckon thirty people were up on their feet, doing the dance that anyone could learn, and you really couldn't tell by that point who was the core company and who was passing through and who was front of house staff and who'd never set foot in the room before: and I was very very happy. The kind of happy where you can't really imagine being happier. <i>And then...!</i> And then we had to go home, so we missed the party on the last night. None of us who'd hosted and facilitated the project were there any more. But the dance... Ah, the dance was still there. And the next day Jon Spooner tweeted this video, of our dance erupting in the middle of something completely different. Nothing to do with us; and everything; and nothing again. Because theatre belongs to everyone, and ideas belong to no one, and the great thing about the dance that anyone can easily learn is that anyone can learn it. Just like that. <br /><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="330" mozallowfullscreen="" src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/25293843?title=0&amp;byline=0&amp;portrait=0" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="440"></iframe></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div>(Thank you so much to Simon Wainwright from <a href="http://www.hopeandsocial.com/">Hope&amp;Social</a> for creating the space for that to happen in.)<br /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">* * *</div><br /><br />And that, my friends, is that. Like, <i>really</i> that.<br /><br />It's taken me ten days (on and off) to make this post; I'm not sure if it's the longest ever to grace these pages -- I suppose it would be fitting to go out on a long, if not on a high, but I'm not too bothered. The more important thing is, doing it has been a nice reminder of what's been enjoyable here over the past five and a half years. It's made me wonder whether I'll miss this space more than I currently think; and maybe I will.<br /><br />I suppose one measure of the period of my life that this blog has covered since its <a href="http://beescope.blogspot.com/2006/05/so-then-here-we-are.html">diffident beginnings in May 2006</a> is that, down here at the close of 2011, my life is oriented around the presence and collaboration of two people more than any others (and among many): Jonny Liron and Ric Watts. At the point that the blog started, Ric was just a name I vaguely knew from the footer of occasional promotional emails, and Jonny and I knew nothing about each other's existence -- he was still a teenager, in fact. (*heart breaks*) Which is not just to say "oooh isn't five years a long time, you could get a Mars bar for 55p" etc., but more than that, it's about how, very often, the day before your life changes, you really have no idea who's going to step into the frame and turn everything upside down: and I suppose part of what I want to do at this point is make more space in my life for those game-changing things to happen in. And it doesn't happen so much when you're spending too much time sitting at a desk keeping a blog fed: especially a hungry blog like this.<br /><br />Thankfully, and perhaps appropriately (it's nearly always been a bit like this), I can't just ramble on and on through a sort of K-Tel album of valedictory platitudes: I need to be out of the house in thirty minutes and there's lots to do before I go. Most immediately, I'm off to BAC to do the final London performance of <i>The Adventures of Wound Man and Shirley. </i>(Nearly lost my voice last night so I'm a bit anxious, but I'm doing honey and lemon linctus and camomile tea and lots of water and aspirin and I'm hoping all that might do the trick.) And then next week I'm at the Jerwood Space, working on <i>GOD/HEAD </i>with a beautiful young actor I hardly know and have never worked with before, and I suspect it's going to be an intense and revelatory week, and I can't wait to get in there. And somewhere between now and then, there's another New Year's Eve, and some time just to live in, I hope, and be thankful, and love the people I'm with when the clocks go bong.<br /><br />As I promised in a previous post, Chris Goode &amp; Company will have a proper-bo (though probably not too fancypants) web site up and running before long, and I'll keep the sidebar here updated with news of that, as well as upcoming performances and stuff. And hopefully before long there'll be a Thompson's book. So keep an eye out, won't you, and if you want to be on CG&amp;Co's mailing list you can email me <a href="mailto:mail@chrisgoodeonline.com">here</a>. For now, do feel free to leave any comments here. And, may I say, it's been a pleasure to have your company over the past few years, and a privilege to have had so many smart and engaged and feisty and appreciative readers. I hope you'll stay in touch.<br /><br />Wishing you all the best in 2012 and beyond.<br /><br />Chris<br />xx<br /><br />p.s. Don't forget the year-end Thompson's Wall of Sound -- it's the next post down -- click on 'Older posts' or on this <a href="http://beescope.blogspot.com/2011/12/this-is-little-placeholder-for-kind-of.html">link</a> here.Chris Goodehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17993698000314709291noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28051672.post-46405543219191971492011-12-30T16:03:00.000+00:002011-12-31T20:29:25.502+00:00<br />THOMPSON'S WALL OF SOUND<br />Year ending 31/12/2011<br /><br /><br /><b>1 &nbsp; Anne-James Chaton, </b>'Le Printemps de Teheran' from <i>Evenements 09 </i>[Raster-Noton]<br /><b>2 &nbsp; Wagon Christ, </b>'Toomorrow' from <i>Toomorrow </i>[Ninja Tune]<br /><b>3 &nbsp;&nbsp;</b><b>Jookabox,</b> 'Man-Tra' from <i>The Eyes of the Fly </i>[Asthmatic Kitty / Joyful Noise]<br /><b>4 &nbsp; Austra, </b>'Lose It' from <i>Feel It Break </i>[Domino]<br /><b>5&nbsp;&nbsp; John Maus, </b>'Hey Moon' from <i>We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves </i>[Upset! The Rhythm]<br /><b>6 &nbsp; Peter Murphy, </b>'Velocity Bird' from <i>Ninth </i>[Nettwerk]<br /><b>7&nbsp;&nbsp; Ron Sexsmith, </b>'Michael and his Dad' from <i>Long Player Late Bloomer </i>[WEA]<br /><b>8 &nbsp; Das Racist, </b>'Punjabi Song (feat. Bikram Singh)' from <i>Relax </i>[Greedhead Entertainment]<br /><b>9&nbsp;&nbsp; Harold Budd, </b>'The Foundry (for Mika Vainio)<i></i>' from <i>In The Mist </i>[Darla]<br /><b>10&nbsp; Daedelus, </b>'Penny Loafers (feat. Inara George)' from <i>Bespoke </i>[Ninja Tune]<br /><b>11&nbsp; Bigott, </b>'God is Gay' from <i>The Orinal Soundtrack </i>[Grabaciones En El Mar]<br /><b>12&nbsp; Puzzle Muteson, </b>'I Was Once A Horse' from <i>En Garde </i>[Bedroom Community]<br /><b>13&nbsp; Beardyman, </b>'Game Over (Latex Quim)' from <i>I Done A Album </i>[Sunday Best]<br /><b>14&nbsp; Aids Wolf, </b>'London#s Not Like Back Home' from <i>Ma Vie Banale Avant-Garde </i>[Lovepump United]<br /><b>15&nbsp; Wiggy, </b>'Rattle' from <i>Gonk </i>[Gasman]<br /><b>16&nbsp; Ford + Lopatin, </b>'Joey Rogers' from <i>Channel Pressure </i>[Software]<br /><b>17&nbsp; Austin Peralta, </b>'Capricornus' from <i>Endless Planets </i>[Brainfeeder]<br /><b>18&nbsp; Cut Hands, </b>'Shut Up And Bleed' from <i>Afro Noise vol. 1 </i>[Very Friendly / Susan Lawly]<br /><b>19&nbsp; Frank Ocean, </b>'Novacane' from <i>Nostalgia/ultra </i>[self-released]<br /><b>20 Tune-Yards, </b>'Gangsta' from <i>W H O K I L L </i>[4AD]<br /><b>21&nbsp; The Muppets Barbershop Quartet, </b>'Smells Like Teen Spirit' from <i>The Muppets OST </i>[Disney]<br /><b>22&nbsp; Rachael Dadd, </b>'Claw and Tooth' from <i>Bite The Mountain </i>[Broken Sound]<br /><b>23&nbsp; Kenneth otto Carney, </b>'Colors Change' from <i>Colors Change </i>[self-released via Bandcamp]<br /><b>24&nbsp; Chris Cochrane / Dennis Cooper / Ishmael Houston-Jones, </b>'I Met Julian Andes, 19, In Line' from <i>Them </i>[Tzadik]<br /><b>25&nbsp; Dan Michaelson, </b>'Knots' from <i>Sudden Fiction </i>[Editions]<br /><b>26&nbsp; Seefeel, </b>'Dead Guitars' from <i>Seefeel </i>[Warp]<br /><b>27&nbsp; Son Lux, </b>'Flickers' from <i>We Are Rising </i>[anticon.]<br /><b>28&nbsp; Container, </b>'Application' from <i>LP </i>[Spectrum Spools]<br /><i> </i><b>29&nbsp; Swede Mason, </b>'Masterchef Synesthesia (Buttery Biscuit Bass)' [ShineTV / Dental Records]<br /><b>30&nbsp; Zee Avi, </b>'The Book of Morris Johnson' from <i>Ghostbird </i>[Brushfire]<br /><b>31&nbsp; Marianne Morris, </b>'Solace Poem (Atticus - Haunted Mix)' from <i>Solace Poem </i>[Tusk]<br /><b>32&nbsp; Balam Acab, </b>'Under' from <i>Wander/Wonder (Bonus CD) </i>[Tri Angle]<br /><b>33&nbsp; Lullatone, </b>'A Picture of Your Grandparents When They Were Young' from <i>Soundtracks for Everyday Adventures</i> [self-released]<br /><b>34&nbsp; Tinariwen, </b>'Tenere Taqqim Tossam (feat. Tunde Adebimpe + Kyp Malone) from <i>Tassili </i>[V2]<br /><b>35&nbsp; Rafael Toral, </b>'III.1' from <i>Space Elements vol. 3 </i>[Staubgold]<br /><b>36&nbsp; Seth Horvitz, </b>'Study no. 29: Tentacles' from <i>Eight Studies for Automatic Piano </i>[Line]<br /><b>37&nbsp; Jenny Hval, </b>'Portrait of the Young Girl as an Artist' from <i>Viscera </i>[Rune Grammofon]<br /><b>38&nbsp; William Shatner, </b>'Planet Earth' from <i>Seeking Major Tom </i>[Cleopatra Records]<br /><b>39&nbsp; Colin Stetson, </b>'All The Colors Bleached to White' from <i>New History Warfare vol.2 - Judges </i>[Constellation]<br /><b>40&nbsp; Justin Vivian Bond, </b>'In The End' from <i>Dendrophile </i>[Weatherbox]<br /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><embed height="345" src="http://www.box.com//static/flash/box_explorer.swf?widget_hash=9nmb6cb1uv3x18065de3&amp;v=1&amp;cl=0&amp;s=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="460" wmode="transparent"></embed></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><span style="font-size: xx-small;">SMALL PRINT: If you own the copyright in any of these tracks and wish it to be removed from this playlist, please <a href="mailto:mail@chrisgoodeonline.com">email the Bank Manager</a>.</span>Chris Goodehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17993698000314709291noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28051672.post-24644829376961865142011-12-09T10:48:00.001+00:002011-12-09T11:52:23.068+00:00Revising downwards<br />Just quickly :)<br /><br />There's a scene in my play <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2004/may/25/theatre"><i>Weepie</i></a> where, for reasons I won't go into -- <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Kobdb37Cwc&amp;ob=av3n">actually, there are no reasons, what reasons do you need to be shown?</a>, one of the boys, named Petrel, is trying to prove to the other, named Edsel, his dedication to their cause and their friendship by accurately recalling the sequence of ingredients on a particular shish kebab skewer. Time and again, increasingly panicked, he tries to get the order right, working faster and faster through the possible permutations of meat and vegetables, until finally, in a sudden moment of clarity, he interrupts himself: "What the fuck am I doing? What am I doing, Edsel?" It was always one of my favourite moments in the original production -- Finlay Robertson as Petrel had a quite unerring sense of the complex rhythms of that sequence so as to make the scene as funny and scary as it needed to be.<br /><br />I'm telling you that because I myself had a Petrel Shish Kebab moment yesterday afternoon, and it was really horrible. I was working on album review number five or six out of the promised Furtive 50. I'd enjoyed none of it to this point. Certainly not the writing; not even, very much, the process of choosing the fifty records I'd write about. The least annoying part of it so far had been the chore of setting up the skeleton posts, uploading all the album covers, filling in label names, the mindless bit. But now there I was trying to write -- not that the specifics matter, but... -- about Son Lux's <i>We Are Rising</i>: and it's a brilliant album, but it had taken me twenty minutes to write thirty words. The trouble was, though I genuinely wanted to share the brilliance of the music with you, I found I had no interest whatsoever in <i>what I thought about it</i>. It doesn't matter. Right now, it really couldn't matter less. The process of trying to write imaginatively about Son Lux seems sort of transcendentally irrelevant. I don't believe it is, actually, irrelevant: but for whatever reason I couldn't securely feel that there was any good reason to be engaged in that task.<br /><br />Maybe it was the sudden settling of inertia that happens after you've handed your notice in. I'm sure that's part of it. Also -- no reason not to go for full disclosure on this -- I've been really struggling with depression in the past few weeks, not for the first time but for the first time in a long time and in a sharper and more debilitating way than for a decade. It's not (currently) constant but it's always lurking, and a twenty minute spiral can helter-skelter me with remarkable rapidity from an evenish keel to the blackest existential sump. Having to keep showing up to work -- I mean, the public bits of my work, first <i>Keep Breathing </i>last month and presently <i>Wound Man and Shirley </i>-- has been really hard and draining. Hopefully none of that comes through in those performances. It doesn't seem to, thanks to the warmth and generosity of most audiences. And from the moment I arrive at the venue till the moment I'm on my own again at the end of the evening, I'm OK. And then, after that, I might still be OK, or I might not be.<br /><br />I think part of what made me not OK yesterday was <a href="http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=28051672&amp;postID=4332009052594091124">the first comment on my last post</a>. I have no idea -- I mean I honestly can't tell -- whether it's meant to be fun-snarky or properly cruel (and presumably the author neither knows I'm depressed nor cares that I might be), but in my present depleted state those two things are hardly different, particularly on a day like yesterday when it's gloomy and stormy out. I've also been proud about how little of that there's been on this blog over the past few years, the kind of pseudonymous below-the-line carping that now makes large swathes of the online media -- for me, at least -- untouchably toxic. If that's how it is now, even here, at a time when I'm not particularly enjoying myself or finding being here very rewarding, then, frankly, pepper lamb sweetcorn mushroom what the fuck am I doing.<br /><br />Last night, in the few hours between leaving BAC and finally managing to go to bed, I spoke at length to two old friends. One of them, who has good reason to relate to my what the fuck moment, helped me to see that if I wasn't going to relish spending almost every spare minute of the next ten days writing album reviews, or at least feel sure of the value of doing it if I didn't enjoy it, then there wasn't much reason to do it. The other one, in a Skype window I dearly wished I could have put my hand through <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djV11Xbc914&amp;ob=av3e">like Morten Harket</a>, made me realise that I don't take enough care of fun. You know me, my dears, I'm not that good at fun. I sort of distrust it. But the aversion is self-destructive. Fun is play space. Fun is remembering how to be light. My work is nothing, is actually impossible, if I can't be light there. But I'm so focused on work, so caught up in it -- partly because my experience of it is not of focus in a narrow sense but of incalculable breadth and variety and excess such that it includes everything -- that I sometimes need reminding that, even if everything under the sun can be pressed into the service of my working vision, there still has to be room for lightness and fun and goofiness and kicking back. Sometimes in my life I know this. Sometimes I don't. Last night I didn't, till I did. Thanks, old friends.<br /><br />So, there we are. The sky is blue this morning and next week I'm in Bradford starting work on a new show which needs to feel like a light and clear and blue-skied beginning, and the week after that it's the week that has Christmas at the end of it and sorry look I don't want to write any more record reviews. I want to go to the pub with people I love and have the sort of fun that I'll still remember when the utter, thoroughgoing, ineffable technicolor irrelevance of my opinion of the new Son Lux album has long since fully revealed itself.<br /><br />I'm revising my intentions downwards. (There'd have been a song of that name had Lionel Bart ever got it together to collaborate with Alistair Darling.) I'll write one last post for this place sometime between now and December 31st. It might end up being more than one, but I doubt it. I'll say what I think I might enjoy saying about the past year, and maybe a little about the blog. And then we'll all set off into a new year, in search of lightness and new beginnings and a little fun. There is always quite a lot of <i>this</i>, whatever this is; but there's always a lot more of <i>everything else</i>.<br /><br /><br />Chris Goodehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17993698000314709291noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28051672.post-43320090525940911242011-12-07T19:58:00.001+00:002011-12-07T23:10:28.204+00:00A rest<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-GGTepw7feE4/Tt_q2eukcHI/AAAAAAAADa4/vZaXq4AXuRQ/s1600/4+-+task+2%252C+example+image.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="283" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-GGTepw7feE4/Tt_q2eukcHI/AAAAAAAADa4/vZaXq4AXuRQ/s400/4+-+task+2%252C+example+image.jpeg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>from</i> Lisa Jeschke &amp; Lucy Beynon, 'Public Performance of a Sound Piece [live, in 60 movements]' (2011)</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><br /><br /><br />Well, my friends, this is not the post I thought it was going to be.<br /><br />On October 24th, I wrote nearly all of a long post called "Beyond an art of refusal", which was an attempt to think through a number of questions about what it means, as an artist, to make a statement. Not a statement as in a manifesto or a 'mission statement', particularly: just any kind of intervention that puts something into the world that was not exactly there before in exactly that form, and which is not (or not only) a question or a game-space or open system or merely the casting of a shadow of a doubt on some pre-existing mark, but is first and foremost an assertion in its own right, an indicative statement of what we actually think or see or feel or want, or what we wish to draw to the concerted attention of an audience. (Needless to say I am describing here -- and was trying to describe in the groundwork to that post -- something that for many makers will feel almost comically rudimentary, and for others will feel horribly suspect and maybe even passé, right from the get-go.)<br /><br />Really I wanted to write about some remarkable recent work by Lisa Jeschke and Lucy Beynon, which they made as part of a decentred workshop I've mentioned here before called <i>Queer Eye Enquiry</i>, which I ran this autumn for the Live Art Development Agency's DIY programme, with the support of Fierce. (That's a frame from one of their pieces above.) Lisa and Lucy are exciting and unsettling because they combine an extremely focused rigour with a willingness to play. What sometimes happens, though, for me, or what at least was coming through in the workshop, is that their playfulness becomes a way of getting off a hook onto which their rigour and their ethical self-consciousness has more or less impaled them, with effects that can sometimes hobble the political robustness that I think drives their practice. My experience of the work is of being challenged, frustrated, tantalised, inspired, let down sometimes, but always more than intrigued to see what's next.<br /><br />The route of the post was going to take us between two works of my own -- <i>Keep Breathing</i>, which I was then just getting ready to do at the Drum in Plymouth (and which I've now done there); and <i>King Pelican</i>, my last major show for the Drum. (It's a play about Edward Lear, who I think -- in the play, at least -- shares with Beynon and Jeschke a nearly immobilizing abhorrence of the violence, the violating irruption, of the artistic statement as an enacted and forcible gesture.) The journey from point to point took us through Stella Duffy on improvisation, Jonny Liron on Jeremy Hardingham, Radu Malfatti on reductionist improvised music and the Wandelweiser collective, and then a long passage reflecting on my responses (over time) to Lucinda Childs's stunning <i>DANCE</i> at the Barbican, and finally to Lisa Jeschke and Lucy Beynon (and out via Edward Lear and Occupy LSX).<br /><br />The reason you're reading <i>this</i> post and not <i>that</i> one is, I'm afraid, all too banal. I didn't quite get the post finished (though I was probably not more than an hour from hitting 'Publish') before going to Plymouth; I then went to Plymouth and had a busy and in some ways really difficult time (though the show went pretty well) and couldn't make the necessary hour and&nbsp; requisite headspace coincide while I was there; then I came back from Plymouth and went right into doing <i>Wound Man and Shirley </i>at BAC (which also is going well): and with one thing and another, today's the first day I've had properly back at my desk and not gibbering my way through a vast backlog of emails and requests for marketing copy and interviews. The rest of today was clear for finishing the post on refusal. So I opened up the draft, and found that almost all of it had disappeared. There's five paragraphs of it, that's all, the first five paragraphs, by the end of which -- as you'll imagine if you've read this blog much -- I've barely got the cap off my pen.<br /><br />So, I have no idea what became of the probably 3000 words that followed. This blog autosaves every thirty seconds. So it's a mystery. At any rate, the alternatives were clear: rewrite, or abandon.<br /><br />The purpose of this post, though, is not merely to rehearse a contemporary version of <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToBxsZKrUQU">Sullivan's 'Lost Chord'</a> for my young, hip, metropolitan readership (that's you!), but to go a little further. The chief reason I feel reconstructing the missing post is impossible is that, as my regular followers here will know (if I have any left), my posting rate has dropped quite sharply in recent months, and the thought of it taking another six weeks to get something up here along the lines I'd imagined is simply too disheartening. But also, more significantly, it prompts, or re-prompts, a bit of a reality check.<br /><br />I've floated thoughts of this nature before, a few months ago, but I think I've now let those floaters cohere into a single, essentially reliable decision: Thompson's Bank will cease its communications -- of desire, of everything -- at the end of the month.<br /><br />It's not just a problem of time, though that's increasingly the factor that keeps me from being here with anything like the frequency of previous years. I used to argue very stridently -- as I've argued all sorts of things pretty stridently here over the years -- that doing this blog was inseparably part and parcel of doing my theatre work: and so it was. However, happily, at the moment and for the forseeable future (and even the forseeable future has got a bit longer lately), the work of making shows, with people, for audiences, is going to be pretty much back-to-back, and that's certainly the bit I want to prioritise, begging your pardons. This happy upsurge is mostly because of my brilliant producer Ric Watts, the better if less eponymous half of Chris Goode &amp; Company, who is doing unbelievably great work in helping make the things happen that I want to happen, with the people that I want them to happen with. CG &amp; Co will be making three brand new shows between now and next summer, starting with <i>GOD/HEAD </i>at Ovalhouse in February; I'll also be touring <i>Wound Man and Shirley</i> in the spring, and a few other bits and bobs will be biting and bobbing in the gaps. I also want to keep working away from CG &amp; Co, both as a solo writer and director, and in my ongoing partnership with Jonny Liron as Action one19 -- a collaboration which remains absolutely and fiercely at the heart of my practice but which has got squeezed out, for both of us, so much this year that the great plans we were forming last Christmas have hardly come to anything: and I really hate the thought of the same happening in the coming twelve months.<br /><br />I've also found lately -- and I think, ironically, I may have said this before -- that almost everything I want to write about in these pages (even if I never get around to it anyway) I sooner or later remember I've already written about. I hate repeating myself, in any context, but especially here where there's no one whose job or fixed intent it is to prevent me being an unholy bore. Perhaps I'm at a stage in my life and in the development of my work where the challenge, such as it is, is not so much about developing new nodes of thought as about refreshing and refining the connections between them. As I've been saying for at least a couple of years now, what I really want to be doing is turning <i>The Forest and the Field</i>, which was first an academic paper and then a performance lecture, into a book (intended mostly, but not only, for fellow practitioners). And it's both weird and inevitable that this blog is one of the things that's stopping me: and I don't imagine even my keenest readers (hello, you two!) want that. I already slightly resent the amount of writing that's gone into this blog over the past five-and-a-half years; I've never resented it at the time of writing, but once it starts adding up as it does -- over 600,000 words the last time I counted, last summer, so a few thousand more now -- one naturally begins to imagine those words taking other forms, as you might with all the money you've spent on cigarettes, say, or -- to borrow <a href="http://www.rorymcleod.com/">Rory McLeod</a>'s trenchant phrase (again, not for the first time on this blog) -- "all the spunk that was shot for nothing".<br /><br />I do also still want, perhaps as a charm against that particular toothache, to publish some of the better (or more indicative) writing from these pages in book form, probably via Ganzfeld, hopefully before too long. If and when that happens, I'll obviously announce it here -- the whole blog will stay put, at least for the time being, and I'll continue to update the side bar (maybe even more frequently!) with performance dates, publications etc., until all of that stuff migrates to a new CG &amp; Co web site, as Ric and I have been promising each other it will for some months now. I wouldn't even be surprised if there weren't a blog element to that web site -- not least because most of the projects I do now seem to have some kind of blog attached to them as a way of trying to hold the process open a bit -- but I hope I might not immediately fall back into the Thompson's habits of garrulousness, overextension and <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yf0Amcgxot8">tubthumping</a>.<br /><br />For now, I think I can guarantee only one last gasp: I'm going to do, as planned, a Furtive 50 of album reviews, which has generally been a popular regular feature at this time of year. That will start going up on Monday 19th. Before then, I might conceivably get it together to rewrite, or reconceive in such a way as to make it irresistible again, a post on refusal; I might find it helpful to do something on privacy and the idea of the closed door, which is very much on my mind at the moment; and I still owe Sam Ladkin a post on sincerity and the body -- which I'd love to write anyway, no matter the sense of obligation. But perhaps these are all things that could go in the book instead... -- And I'm also half-intending, maybe after Christmas, to do a bit of a best-of-the-year trawl because, more even than in previous years, there's so much I've seen and read and done this year that's never been mentioned here.<br /><br />In the meantime, it's too soon for goodbyes, obviously, but I can at least say with an anticipatory twinkle of imminent demise (<i>vide</i> <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKErIO3HqHo"><i>Dennis Potter and the Blossomest Blossom</i></a>, coming soon to a multiplex near you) that I hope you'll stick around and see December out with me, so that Thompson's can at least finish on a relative high, rather than dwindling into nothingness without anyone even noticing it's slipped away.<br /><br />Thanks, everyone xx<br /><br />Chris Goodehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17993698000314709291noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28051672.post-14586497835582398352011-10-05T00:53:00.000+01:002011-10-05T00:53:13.625+01:00Arrangement in red, green and orange<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-muA3f9h5ne0/Tot9ywWDguI/AAAAAAAAC4I/SJHjEGKNgLw/s1600/405159356.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-muA3f9h5ne0/Tot9ywWDguI/AAAAAAAAC4I/SJHjEGKNgLw/s400/405159356.jpg" width="296" /></a></div><br /><br />I'll spare us all the customary strenuous gesturing of apology for the quiet times hereabouts: for the moment, at least, I'm afraid that such absence may be an exception in the late stages of transmogrifying into a rule.<br /><br />Thing is I'm really super-busy with work (which is good); more pertinently, quite a lot of what I'm busy with at the moment requires keeping another blog, elsewhere, and so all of my posting energies --which are anyway not quite what they were -- are currently focused on that. But that project's given rise to an interesting thought this evening which I thought I'd share here. I feel bad because I owe a lot of people in the world a lot of emails and documents and images (and money) (and apologies) and I could be using this time to clear some of those filthy decks; but actually I'm going to allow myself a few minutes to do this, because I've been feeling really physically below-par today and had decided I'd give myself the evening off to doze in front of a DVD or two -- and then I had this thought that I wanted to write down somewhere -- and now I feel like I'm being virtuous by writing this, rather than dilatory and lead-swinging. I feel pretty virtuous just for sitting up, tbh.<br /><br />So the thing I've been blogging for is my DIY project, which I guess I must have mentioned in a previous post. The Live Art Development Agency runs this fantastic scheme whereby artists get to devise and offer training / professional development projects, workshops etc., to fellow artists. In my case, I wanted to respond to what I felt was a recent kind of climate change around the premises and currents of queer art and activism, and so I offered a series of workshops under the dismally shopworn title of <i>Queer Eye Enquiry</i>: the idea behind which was to create a series of experiences and encounters for willing fellow-travellers which might help them to reframe the parameters of what queer might now be, especially in the present political climate. (I started the preparatory work for the project in the week of the riots in London and elsewhere in England, and the experience of that time and its baleful fallout has inevitably informed a lot of my thinking around what this project might hope to do.) An interesting twist occurred early on, though, in that, in consultation with Fierce -- who have been wonderful partners in helping this all to happen -- it was decided not to run the project in London, as had been my original intention, but rather in a sort of de-centred way, with artists from all over the country (and further afield, even) engaging from their own locales and psychogeographic headspaces. So the format I've ended up using has been a (fairly mammoth) weekly blog post -- without all my usual verbiage, but compiling quite large amounts of text / image / film / sound material, around a loosely described or implied topic each week; each post ends with an assignment to be carried out, and each is preceded a day or two in advance by a kind of preparatory piece of postal correspondence (letters, CDs, postcards, that sort of thing: you can see the first week's red envelopeful above, including a 6x4in rendering of Ken Friedman's <i>Center Piece</i> which regular readers will know I revere; -- lots of Arts Council money blown at Paperchase, in other words, which is greatly complicating my masturbatory fantasies about Quentin Letts: what do we think, ladies, would his foaming disapproval be <i>hot </i>or <i>not</i>?).<br /><br />Assembling these big blog posts has been a really interesting exercise (in a narcissistic way, perhaps; but then, I did get a bit drunk last week and start poking the pub table with my finger while asserting loudly that narcissism is a great virtue in artists -- and I do think there's some truth in that). Particularly as the weeks have gone by -- I'm now assembling the post for the fourth and final week -- what's emerged before my eyes is actually a pretty comprehensive map of almost everything, or at least a lot, <i>a lot</i>, that's been formative for me as a queer artist and, in most cases, has remained very presently valuable. A quick skim of the posts so far would reveal works and writings by the likes of Francesca Woodman, Ryan McGinley, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Robert Wilson, John Wieners, William Forsythe, Cy Twombly, Bas Jan Ader, Frank O'Hara, Derek Jarman, Alaric Sumner, John Cage, Bill T. Jones, Tim Miller, Tom Spanbauer, Kathy Acker, Neil Bartlett, Dennis Cooper, Ed Templeton, Harmony Korine, Luigi y Luca, Will McBride, Kenji Siratori, Caroline Bergvall, and John Berger; plus lashings of Viennese Aktionism, skateboarding, and any amount of cheerful young dudes with their cocks out. I mean it's not totally exhaustive but, in the event of apocalypse, I could probably be re-engineered from scratch out of DNA-spattered scraps of these artists' works, thoughts, attitudes and self-stagings. It's been reminding me a bit of something my therapist told me back when I was walking wounded aged 21: go home, she said, and look at your room, at the pictures on your walls and the books on your shelves, and see what you're telling yourself about yourself. Boy, that was a sock in the jaw when I tried it...<br /><br />I've also, tonight, been thinking a bit about how inextricable my work (mostly as a theatre personage; somewhat as a poet, too) and my queerness are: which is something I've been attesting to for years without ever having thought it all the way back, as it were -- like, when I think back to the very first things I "staged", as a kid of 7 or 8. Not just the little variety shows that me and my friends would perform for our mums and dads (I say "little"; I have a feeling they were probably longer than <i>Peer Gynt</i>, some of them), but the things I'd make happen -- or, to deploy the phrase I find myself using more and more frequently these days to describe what I make as an artist: "constructed events". So: the sports day I organized the summer I was 7; the "judo parties" where the other neighbourhood boys and I would vaguely wrestle in our living room, in tightly organized tournaments, while the local girls were invited to come along and serve squash and biscuits (I know, I know, I was <i>the worst</i> eight-year-old chauvinist, what can I say, it was 1981 and I didn't know any better and I still wake up shuddering and I'm sorry, I'm truly sorry); the little turns I'd do in school assembly (one of which involved blacking up to portray the footballer Pele; please see previous apology, <i>mutatis mutandis</i>); the role-playing games my best friend and I would act out, which for him were surely no more than pretend sci-fi play but for me were semi-prepared episodes of an imaginary tv series.<br /><br />Behind all these activities there were these two impulses, side by side. One was about wanting to make things happen that caused the grown-ups in my life -- mostly, but not only, my parents -- to be delighted and impressed. The other was about <i>wanting</i> things, wanting to see and feel things that I couldn't otherwise experience except in books and on t.v.; partly wanting to make things that didn't and wouldn't otherwise exist, but also wanting things that I simply couldn't ask for. I talk a lot these days, to students particularly, about theatre -- perhaps more than any other art form, though I think it's probably somewhat true of all arts -- being principally an art of wanting, and of being prepared to want out loud. (I've probably written about it here before, too.) But in saying that I don't always make the connection back to -- for example -- the first nude scene I ever wrote as a playwright, which was when I was eight and, on my first typewriter, I was bashing out a cursory adaptation of a children's book called <i>Albert and the Dragonettes</i> and introducing into it a gratuitous beach scene purely because there was a younger boy down the road who I didn't know very well and I was longing, <i>longing</i>, to the point of sleeplessness and shortness of breath, to see what he looked like without any clothes on. But one couldn't just <i>ask</i> (or at least, so I thought; it'd be another couple of years before I found out it was sometimes just worth chancing that approach!); what one <i>could </i>do was script it -- which gave the desire a kind of spurious, abstracted authority in relation to which I suppose I had some degree of deniability. -- And thirty years on, for all that I may (arguably) have a slightly more developed practice now, that same basically erotic pulse still keeps time with my artistic desires.<br /><br />But I think I've only really noticed for the first time this evening how those two things -- wanting to delight and entertain others, and wanting to legitimize my own desire and create safe spaces for the things I lacked in the world to become visible -- are actually <i>about each other</i>. They're about making my queerness -- of which I was already perfectly aware at the age of seven: and I don't just mean in terms of fancying boys (which only became inconvenient later on) but in terms of feeling like there was a kind of renegade alter ego living inside me who might emerge at any moment like the Hulk and betray my bright-green weirdness and abnormality -- acceptable. Not just acceptable but indispensible, in fact. Which in turn helps me to see why so much of my preoccupation as an adult theatre artist has been about the extent to which performance events register as real -- or don't. If I ask, as I often have: does the subjunctivity of the constructed event impede its political consequentiality?, at another level I'm really asking: is it possible for me to come here and speak honestly about myself? -- Which in turn triggers memories of a whole bunch of short plays I wrote as a teenager, in sixth form in particular, in which the central characters, invariably played by me, were endlessly coming out as gay. A way of saying something while at the same time not having risked saying it.<br /><br />Obviously these days, what I <i>want</i> -- the array of acts of wanting that together make up a theatre practice -- is very much more about political questions, about kinds of social relations that it might be possible both to imagine and to realise in a theatrical frame. (Though of course there's still nothing more suggestive to me of the radicalism of those relational matrices than seeing people get naked within them, and/or being willing to be sexually desired by an audience of strangers.) And what I think a more conscious engagement of late with queerness as a lived-out strain of anticapitalist dissidence has enabled me to see is that I was wrong, at least to a degree, in my anxiety about those shifts of register when we move out of the theatre back into the real world. (Sprinkle ye scare quotes where ye may.) To travel from theatrical space into a real-life place is not, ultimately, an intrinsically quasi-transdiegetic movement of the kind that we feel most jarringly when the 'dead' stand up and bow at the end of a Shakespeare tragedy, say -- or, for that matter, when we wake up from a dream. I had thought that there was a problem with the political efficacy of theatre as a host site for hypothetical reconfigurations of the structures and forms of social relationships because it involved a movement from a constructed event back out into a real world beyond. What thinking more searchingly about queerness (as an anticapitalist commitment) has helped me to understand is that the transition is not one that takes us across immiscible degrees or pitches of reality. If an instance of theatre is a constructed event, then so too is liberal-democratic late capitalist society a network of constructed events. We -- I -- have perhaps been guilty of accepting the unspoken assumption that the way we live now is somehow the product of naturally occurring forces, working themselves inexorably out. The truth is that almost everything we do -- especially everything we do together (and queerness is something that can only be present in a place of togetherness) -- is shaped by underlying systematic and ideological forces that are every bit as artificial, as synthetic, as constructed as theatre is, or any other kind of fiction; in fact, more so, because capitalism masks its source code beneath so many other layers of text. I always thought my sense that I lived mostly (and best) "within" theatre was partly a metaphor, or at any rate partly fanciful, a sort of luvvie exaggeration to be announced in a loud voice over risotto at the Jerwood Space; but queerness so abundantly and fluidly exceeds the limits of that metaphor that I now think I can be braver than ever about attesting to the conscious concerted inhabitability of theatre practice as a sustainable way of refusing the lies that capitalism tells about itself.<br /><br />I suppose the only other thing I want to say about all that, by way of a postscript, is that the DIY project is called <i>Queer Eye Enquiry</i> because I wanted to work not only with comfortably self-identifying queer artists, but also with others who wouldn't necessarily call themselves (or their work) 'queer' but who could see that there might be something interesting or productive in spending some time looking at the world with a queered gaze -- and letting the world look back in the same spirit. I've been involved in an interesting <a href="http://bebrowed.wordpress.com/2011/09/13/better-than-language-and-queer-praxis/">ongoing conversation</a> recently with John Armstrong, over at his excellent Bebrowed blog, about the <i>Better Than Language</i> anthology (still available for a tenner -- "pre-publication offer" indeed!, ho ho -- <a href="http://www.ganzfeldpress.com/">over here</a>), about the ways in which identifying work as queer may or may not be a stumbling block for those who don't identify as queer themselves, or who see 'queer' as a reductive category lens to try and view the work through. If there is something in that, then there's a task here: queer, like anticapitalist, is not a prescription but an invitation, one that's open to all who will dare to accept it. I must admit I struggle with the notion of a truly queer heterosexuality, but that doesn't mean I'm not interested in that struggle: and certainly those artists whose work graces the <i>Queer Eye Enquiry</i> blog are of every conceivable sexual orientation (though I must confess there's much too great a preponderance of cisgender artists as it stands; I suppose I was always bound to end up reflecting my own species of queerness rather than trying to represent everyone under the LGBTQWERTYUIOP sun) -- they're represented because I think their work lends itself to queer readings: and queerness, finally, is a property of readings and relationships, not of individuals. So, I hope you know -- whoever you are, and especially whoever you fuck, everything I just wrote is about you. If you want it, that is.<br /><br />OK, well, lots more to say -- not least about what I'm up to work-wise, which most imminently includes the extraordinary <i>Sixty-Six Books </i>project at the Bush (where I'm directing Michael Rosen's very striking piece from Amos, with the wonderful Harold Finley, as well as my own play, <i>The Loss Of All Things</i>, which on the back of just three days' rehearsal is being performed <i>extraordinarily </i>(I reckon) by Gareth Kieran Jones, Christian Roe and Rick Warden); and after that, <i>Keep Breathing</i>, at the Drum in Plymouth, and nearer Christmas (but not quite signed-and-sealed yet) a short London run of <i>The Adventures of Wound Man and Shirley </i>(the script of which has now been published, rather gorgeously, by Oberon, and can be purchased either via them or by sending an inquisitive email to <a href="mailto:orders@ganzfeldpress.com">Ganzfeld</a>). Proper updates about all that stuff soon (ish), I hope -- though I hardly dare promise. And then of course there are so many things I've seen and read and so on that I really ought to have written about here, and haven't, and plainly won't now; probably if you really want to know what I've been up to and what I think about it then the likeliest way of getting to hear about it is to drop me a line and we'll go for a drink ;)<br /><br />What I <i>can</i> just finally stick up here is a short review of an exhibition, <i>The Weaklings</i>, which I saw at Five Years in Hackney earlier in the summer. I wrote this piece as a submission for a prize that I very emphatically have. not. won. -- so now I can share it with you, huzzah.<br /><br />Meanwhile, I hope you're doing great, wherever you are, and perhaps we'll say hello again soon, one way or another.<br /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">* * *</div><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-TDwYpSJ9atk/Tot3zxI1SwI/AAAAAAAAC4E/8B9EpwllcQc/s1600/jw+goatmouth.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-TDwYpSJ9atk/Tot3zxI1SwI/AAAAAAAAC4E/8B9EpwllcQc/s400/jw+goatmouth.jpg" width="298" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Joel Westendorf, <i>Goatmouth </i>(2005)</div><br /><br /><br /><br /><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:SnapToGridInCell/> <w:WrapTextWithPunct/> <w:UseAsianBreakRules/> <w:DontGrowAutofit/> </w:Compatibility> <w:BrowserLevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> </w:WordDocument></xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" LatentStyleCount="156"> </w:LatentStyles></xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 10]><style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} </style><![endif]--> <br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 130%;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 130%;">‘The Weaklings’</span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 130%;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 130%;">Curated by Dennis Cooper</span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 130%;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 130%;">Five Years, Hackney, 11-26 June 2011</span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 130%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 130%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 130%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 130%;">Like most great contemporary buildings, the prodigious blog of writer Dennis Cooper is an exciting space to visit because its structure has been invented from the inside by its users, not imposed from above by its nominal owner. It’s learned its shape from the needs and desires of the people who hang out there—an <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ad hoc</i> community of authors, artists and fans who gather to discuss Cooper’s daily posts and their own experiments in creative living. Here, the social promise of online collaboration—a promise that elsewhere has often appeared broken—is restlessly renewed.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 130%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 130%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 130%;">That blog has now given rise—and lent its name, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Weaklings</i>—to an art show, at Five Years in Hackney, which draws together work in various media by fifteen of the blog’s denizens, representing a range of relationships with the world of professional art practice. You’d expect lurches, gaucheness maybe, and to an extent you get them, but they’re smoothed into a fun ride by Cooper’s curatorial elan and a remarkable consistency of poise and self-assurance.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 130%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 130%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 130%;">What comes through first is not thematic but tonal: a complicated, reflexive melancholy, familiar perhaps from Cooper’s own work. People here are half-grasped ideas, waiting for a moment of clarity that may never come, a desire that arrives ready-thwarted in the imagination. There’s a kind of intimacy, but the closer the object comes, the more comprehension recedes—out of kindness, maybe. These artists abundantly belie Tom Lehrer’s loveless wisecrack that if a person has a communication problem, the least he can do is shut up about it.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 130%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 130%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 130%;">The show’s key text might be Joel Westendorf’s four untitled animal portraits: glossy photographs of an open-mouthed (screaming?; startled?; yawning?) goat and giraffe, a contortedly sprawling alpaca, a deeply self-involved kangaroo. I’m reminded of Peter Hujar’s ‘Goat, Westown, 1978’, who’ll stare you out forever; the barrier—is it species difference, or language discontinuity?—becomes infused with a pressure that feels both numinous and disorientingly erotic. Westendorf’s animal pictures, especially the goat against its solid orange background, work like semi-staged celebrity candids: vivacious, unreliable.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 130%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 130%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 130%;">There are real(ish) celebrities in Jared Pappas-Kelley’s video, ‘just cant get you out of my head’, in which a stuttering synthetic female voice endlessly restates the lyrics of Kylie’s song, while familiar low-grade snapshots of the likes of Stephen Dorff and Christopher Atkins, sourced from online repositories of male nude celeb images, rotate on-screen, pivoting on their fathomlessly disappointing cocks. What eventually starts to throb in the mind, though, is the luridly busy domestic wallpaper Pappas-Kelley sets behind them: invoking perhaps our propensity for recognizing human faces in almost any pattern, holding ourselves in a claustrophobic loop of fixated titillation and disappointment: “boy it’s more than I dare to think about.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 130%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 130%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 130%;">Fittingly, this tendency in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Weaklings</i> artists finds its apotheosis on the gallery floor, in a brace of low-key but powerfully intrepid works by Alex Rose. First, a tied bundle of damaged-looking magazines and papers: only the top picture—a very young model in underwear and socks, just shy of being legally problematic—is readable; in the other room, a composite places a spider’s web, in a dream thought-bubble maybe, beside a near-naked, bandaged, sleeping child, unglossed but recognizable as Ruben van Assouw, nine-year-old sole survivor of last year’s Airbus crash in Tripoli. The image of the hospitalized boy distils with discomfiting efficiency the suggestiveness of the whole show. Pain and sleep are two irrecuperably private states which can only leave the spectator wondering. Were this encounter more public, we’d be enrolled as witnesses: but in this little gallery, no one will help validate or care for our speculative projections. We’re left with doubt, configured as a particular strain of tenderness which is not unlike desire: wanting to dare to know.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 130%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 130%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 130%;">That dumb old theatrical adage about not working with children and animals is actually of course a proposition about control and authority. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Weaklings</i>—the show, like the blog—is a space in which gestures towards control become spurious. Cooper’s vision, like that of the artists he attracts, is anarchic; productively so. Not only animals and children but celebrities too are our exiles, painfully stranded outside the language constructs of desire and consent. But our tyrannic power over them is unwelcome here; only a radical, liberatory weakness will change us.</span></div><br /><br />Chris Goodehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17993698000314709291noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28051672.post-86962729377641269402011-08-28T19:54:00.004+01:002011-08-28T22:10:35.154+01:00Strive for perfection in the hope of<span style="font-style: italic;">Sorry to disappoint those who asked if there'd be an Edinburgh diary this year; or -- let's look on the bright side -- happy to oblige those who asked if there'd be an Edinburgh diary this year in the secret hope that there wouldn't.</span>
<br />
<br /><span style="font-style: italic;">I will write a tiny bit about Edinburgh in a few days, when it's all properly over and I've slept a little and I'm back at my desk.
<br />
<br />In the meantime, I thought I'd post here a couple of things that may be of interest to some readers:
<br />
<br />Firstly, the texts from the bathroom section of </span>Where We Meet<span style="font-style: italic;">, the home-performance piece we've been trying out this past week. These five texts are heard issuing, barely decipherably, from a little dictaphone by the side of the bath. They're developed from a variety of sources including Book I of Euclid's </span>Elements <span style="font-style: italic;">(with which I'm becoming a little obsessed at the moment) in #2, and the journals of Donald Crowhurst in #4.
<br />
<br />Secondly, I thought I'd post here something I wrote for an event that's been taking place at Dennis Cooper's blog this weekend in memory of an incredibly talented artist and provocateur, our friend and comrade <a href="http://obits.al.com/obituaries/birmingham/obituary.aspx?n=tony-urdiales&amp;pid=153190600">Antonio Urdiales</a>, who died very recently at the age of 26. Just one of the million bizarre and beautiful things I associate with Antonio (Tony to those who knew him better than I) was a curious eruption some years ago of comments from Antonio convulsively expressing his strange obsessive love/hate/hate/hate fixation on Shirley Bassey, and it was that which prompted my text. I wrote it pretty quickly in the middle of distracting Edinburgh chaos, so it's not the greatest thing I've ever done and it's too full of the things I do too much or too often when I'm writing in this mode. But I liked it anyway and I'm sad about Antonio and I thought I might as well put the piece here too in remembrance of an amazing young man.
<br />
<br />Please enjoy one or both if you can, and I'll check in again as soon as I'm able.
<br />
<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">
<br />
<br /></span></span><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">* * *</span></span>
<br /></div><span>
<br />
<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">FIVE ETUDES FOR BAS JAN ADER (from <span style="font-style: italic;">Where We Meet</span>)
<br />
<br />
<br />1.</span> <span style="font-weight: bold;">Day 7</span>
<br />
<br />
<br />A.
<br />A life.
<br />A life on.
<br />A life on the.
<br />A life on the adjunct noun.
<br />A life on the adjunct noun, noun.
<br />
<br />A.
<br />A home.
<br />A home on.
<br />A home on the.
<br />A home on the adjective from present participle.
<br />A home on the adjective from present participle, adjectival noun.
<br />
<br />Where.
<br />Where the.
<br />Where the adjective from past participle.
<br />Where the adjective from past participle, plural noun.
<br />Where the adjective from past participle, plural noun, rave.
<br />
<br />And.
<br />And the.
<br />And the plural noun.
<br />And the plural noun their.
<br />And the plural noun their plural noun.
<br />And the plural noun their plural noun keep.
<br />
<br />The plural noun the plural noun the plural noun their plural noun keep.
<br />
<br />The plural noun the plural noun the plural noun their plural noun keep.
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">2. Day 10</span>
<br />
<br />
<br />(i) A bird is that which has no part.
<br />
<br />(ii) A question is breadthless length.
<br />
<br />(iii) The ends of a question are birds.
<br />
<br />(iv) A heroic question is a question which lies evenly with the birds on itself.
<br />
<br />(v) A sky is that which has length and breadth only.
<br />
<br />(vi) The edges of a sky are questions.
<br />
<br />(vii) A night sky is a sky which lies evenly with the heroic questions on itself.
<br />
<br />(viii) A night dream is the inclination to one another of two questions in a night which meet one another and do not lie in a heroic question.
<br />
<br />(ix) And when the questions containing the dream are heroic, the dream is called beautiful.
<br />
<br />(x) When a heroic question standing on a heroic question makes the adjacent dreams equal to one another, each of the equal dreams is right, and the heroic question standing on the other is called beloved to that on which it stands.
<br />
<br />(xiii) A horizon is that which is an extremity of anything.
<br />
<br />(xiv) A naked man is that which is contained by any horizon or horizons.
<br />
<br />(xv) A memory is a naked man at night contained by one question such that all the heroic questions falling upon it from one bird among those lying within the naked man equal one another.
<br />
<br />(xvi) And the bird is called the center of the memory.
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">3. Day 15</span>
<br />
<br />
<br />The sadness ate the words.
<br />
<br />The sadness that the man felt ate the words.
<br />
<br />The sadness that the man that the great sky taunted felt ate the words.
<br />
<br />The sadness that the man that the great sky that the clouds darkened taunted felt ate the words.
<br />
<br />The sadness that the man that the great sky that the clouds that the winds blew darkened taunted felt ate the words.
<br />
<br />The sadness that the man that the great sky that the clouds that the winds that the voyage required blew darkened taunted felt ate the words.
<br />
<br />The sadness that the man that the great sky that the clouds that the winds that the voyage that the work compelled required blew darkened taunted felt ate the words.
<br />
<br />The sadness that the man that the great sky that the clouds that the winds that the voyage that the work that the same sadness threatened compelled required blew darkened taunted felt ate the words.
<br />
<br />The sadness that the man that the great sky that the clouds that the winds that the voyage that the work that the same sadness that the same man needed threatened compelled required blew darkened taunted felt ate the words.
<br />
<br />The sadness of the memory.
<br />
<br />if if if if if if if if if
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">4. Day 17</span>
<br />
<br />
<br />He says reason for system to minimise error.
<br />He says system of books reorganising perfectly.
<br />He says hermits force unnecessary conditions on themselves.
<br />He says wrong decision not perfect time.
<br />He says clocks think no need worry.
<br />He says about time plus or minus but only elapsed time.
<br />
<br />He says very difficult not impossible.
<br />He says strive for perfection in the hope of.
<br />He says if game to put everything back where is back?
<br />He says cannot see any purpose in game.
<br />He says must resign position.
<br />He says if set myself impossible task then nothing achieved by game.
<br />
<br />He says understand exact position of concept of balance of power.
<br />He says it is the only one way of expressing hope.
<br />He says only requirement for have new set of rules is that there is some.
<br />He says no game can devise is harmless.
<br />He says no man may do more than all that he is capable of doing.
<br />He says I am what I am and I see the nature of my offence.
<br />
<br />He says I will resign the game there is no reason for harmful.
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">5.</span>
<br />
<br />
<br /><span style="font-style: italic;">[fading out] </span>
<br />
<br />
<br />Day 22 bird by shadow
<br />
<br />Day 23 shaped by yellow
<br />
<br />Day 24 shadow yes
<br />
<br />Day 25 no now
<br />
<br />Day 26 seaweed yes
<br />
<br />Day 27 blue fly
<br />
<br />Day 28 elope
<br />
<br />Day 29 follow sky
<br />
<br />Day 30 yellow feel
<br />
<br />Day 31 keel slices
<br />
<br />Day 32 no yellow
<br />
<br />Day 33 blades
<br />
<br />Day 34 birds yes
<br />
<br />Day 35 fly now
<br />
<br />Day 36 dare yes
<br />
<br />Day 37 shade shaped
<br />
<br />Day 38 blue sear
<br />
<br />Day 39 swallow no
<br />
<br />Day 40 ices
<br />
<br />Day 41 vis follow
<br />
<br />Day 42 is blue eye
<br />
<br />Day 43 scissor
<br />
<br />Day 44 rid sky
<br />
<br />Day 45 fluke
<br />
<br />Day 46 shard
<br />
<br />Day 47 ask
<br />
<br />Day 48 ado
<br />
<br />Day 49 swollen
<br />
<br />Day 50 was
<br />
<br />Day 51 as
<br />
<br />Day 52 sea
<br />
<br />Day 53 as
<br />
<br />Day 54 a
<br />
<br />Day 55 is
<br />
<br />Day 56 o
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br /></span><div style="text-align: center;"><span>* * *</span>
<br /></div><span>
<br />
<br />
<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">PRINCIPLES OF DIVINE RHYTHM IN THE END TIMES</span> <span style="font-weight: bold;">
<br /><span style="font-style: italic;">for Antonio</span></span>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br /></span><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-style: italic;">“i just slit my wrists in SO MANY DIFFERENT FANTASTICAL DESIGNS”</span>
<br /></div><span>
<br />
<br />
<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-qEOFggus2Rg/Tlqsl0ubLPI/AAAAAAAACuU/rXcMG6XXAKc/s1600/basseyone.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 397px; height: 400px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-qEOFggus2Rg/Tlqsl0ubLPI/AAAAAAAACuU/rXcMG6XXAKc/s400/basseyone.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5646014848670838002" border="0" /></a>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />1.
<br />
<br />BASSEY is the first irrecuperable ghost metropolis, evacuated hurriedly at the signs of late peril. Its skins are an albino fabric and its eyes are literally cobalt. To dare to labour here is an adventure in self-cloaking. BASSEY moans in the disconsolate wind; its arteries open out to the gaping sky. How will we live now in BASSEY with the industrial blossom of its name so ridiculously failed.
<br />
<br />
<br />2.
<br />
<br />BASSEY is a thread or floss that trembles above a ravine of parlous acoustic. Which are the birds and which the glyphs that alight. Shrieking with blast-agitation, BASSEY submits (as it must) to the alternative currents of militant tendresse. It is teased out of itself in the promise of a precarious love. Its principal likeness is to the last remaining sexual imperatives beyond reason.
<br />
<br />
<br />3.
<br />
<br />BASSEY in remix is an instance of telegraphy in excess of its stations, like semen produced spontaneously in nature. The relays are of palomino horses disappearing out of range, maybe, or the lavish curlicues of a projected fan-dance committing itself to the dilated imagination. Deep down, everybody knows that this part of the transaction is flawed. How can a fact be more like a faggot.
<br />
<br />
<br />4.
<br />
<br />BASSEY laid end to end is code for whatever is not yet sufficiently lavish in the task. Its characters and sudden scratches may be mistaken for a kind of fitting entertainer in the abrupt commission of her (or his; but, in fact, always her) apotheosis. More informally, it follows, the syntagmata of gossip or spasm. BASSEY is an episode of weather that remains unaired at the end of a cancelled season.
<br />
<br />
<br />5.
<br />
<br />From BASSEY itself it may be inferred that in the end times, skin is the least mendacious disguise through which an experimental process may be advanced. e.g. Love letters written on parchment are automatically tautologous. BASSEY is a gauge to manual transparency and will rebalance the abundant deficits of sleekness; everybody upstream of here will be shirtless when we get there.
<br />
<br />
<br />6.
<br />
<br />BASSEY persistently functions as a temporary window ledge, suspended out of context many storeys above the base liquid. Here, a loose colloquium of feral majorettes and slut savants can be seen to hunker, pondering approximately zero like remote ungulates stranded in an untended metropolitan labyrinth of artificial foliage. You do not get out without lip service. “Hey big suspended cadence.”
<br />
<br />
<br />7.
<br />
<br />BASSEY having thrown up down itself turns left at the top of the stairs. There are snacks and movies and you can ask to see the dog’s hole. Ext., the vapour trails are perceived to spell out illegibly and posthumously a street artist’s tag in a font called Cilla Extended. In this image you are the wall. You are the plan B that there is no, and the arc’s end is world-submission, and the map is crawling with ginger ants.
<br />
<br />
<br />8.
<br />
<br />BASSEY is a black box recorder finished in vellum with male secondary sexual characteristics. In setting one, the captured voices tremulate obligingly; residues of operetta may be distinguished. In two, the voices exist at the threshold of legibility, immersed all-of-a-sudden in a surging milk of additive white Gaussian noise. Come in, says a boy placed elsewhere, come in, come in.
<br />
<br />
<br />9.
<br />
<br />Tied to a fence and pelted with sharpened entities [species redacted], BASSEY’s intense identification with the perpetrator excites suspicion. Much later there are ambiguous signs of rectal interference, and a new crowd is drawn to the site. An outlet is quickly devised for the purchase of memento foam fingers, branded ducts, a digitalis smoothie if you want. Show yourselves bitches.
<br />
<br />
<br />10.
<br />
<br />There is an immense BASSEY, a soft mannequin, at the brow of a green hill. The nearest man-made object is a space artefact. The uncontested territory of its ambience affords a valuable opportunity to use the word ‘zephyr’. Such a BASSEY is the logo for a commercial freight of used corneas in a dirty heap. Those who trip over themselves to arrive in a rush on occasion fall limitlessly upwards.
<br />
<br />
<br />11.
<br />
<br />We can only wonder at the unhappiness of BASSEY, stripped deracinated hollow mendicant, time-pummelled. Ragged children tug BASSEY’s beard, thieve its buckles, its numbers. Goldfingered dawn splits along its axis and immediately perishes; and synthetic night is a viscous preservative, a glue for life-enhancement. Face it: the etiology of BASSEY is a tranquiliser dart to the naked eye.
<br />
<br />
<br />12.
<br />
<br />Yes BASSEY deplores hurt, but also is deplored by it. Beyond this point lie only unrendered splines and articles of dissociation. Rivulets of lymph in one part. The task ahead concerns discretion and blatancy in circuit. To know better the face of god by spitting in it, spitting your bad self out through your own loaded mouth. To scream viscera. To kiss and unleash, and to keep unleashing.
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0dJSWbrEFiQ/TlqsmITYhgI/AAAAAAAACuc/ExVoM_9Sqlg/s1600/basseytwo.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 358px; height: 400px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0dJSWbrEFiQ/TlqsmITYhgI/AAAAAAAACuc/ExVoM_9Sqlg/s400/basseytwo.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5646014853926127106" border="0" /></a>
<br /></span>Chris Goodehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17993698000314709291noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28051672.post-21144654562138766752011-08-09T17:24:00.000+01:002011-08-09T18:11:51.176+01:00Language teaching (for Hannah Nicklin)
<br />I'm writing this not to convince anyone of anything, but only to give myself some space to think through what I'm feeling and to hear some words said that keep getting immediately crowded out at the moment and shouted down whenever they're uttered by others. (And because I can't concentrate on the work that I ought to be doing, until I get some of this ordered in my head.) For that reason -- and for adjacent reasons that I imagine I'll touch on in the post -- I'm turning off comments on this one. Anyone who knows me well enough to have my email address is welcome to write to me.
<br />
<br />
<br /><div style="text-align: center;">* * *
<br /></div>
<br /><blockquote>You taught me language, and my profit on't
<br />Is, I know how to curse.
<br /><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-style: italic;">The Tempest</span>, Act I sc 2</div></blockquote>
<br />
<br />If you ask me point-blank whether I'm racist -- or homophobic, for that matter -- there'll be a tiny pause before I say "Of course not." This post is about that tiny pause, and the panic that lives there; and it's about feeling that same panic, in a long, drawn-out, almost soothing version, as I drifted off to sleep on Saturday night, with my window a little open and the sounds coming in of summer rain and, behind it, an almost constant stream of police and fire sirens.
<br />
<br />I was born in 1973 and grew up in a little village in the suburbs of Bristol, in a safe little cul-de-sac shaped like a hockey stick. Not wealthy families by any means, but getting by, and proud of their gardens, and squabbling about parking spaces. There's a photo of me dressed up as a Womble (a poor effort, frankly, home-made and half-arsed) at a Silver Jubilee street party, and sometimes when I think of that street I picture it as that jubilee party, in constant low-level swing. Union flag bunting from lamppost to lamppost, and jelly and icecream for the kids.
<br />
<br />I don't think I really understood that it wasn't like this for everybody until the spring of 1980 when the local news suddenly filled up with gritty, scary reportage about a riot that was taking place in an area of Bristol called St Paul's. It was a part of town that I'd never been to -- that I've still never been to, actually -- and so in a way, what was happening there felt weirdly close -- how can this be happening in <span style="font-style: italic;">Bristol?</span> -- and in another way, it might as well have been on another planet. All I picked up from my parents was that this race riot was only to be expected: not because the people who lived in St Paul's were experiencing a degree of deprivation and despair that would inevitably erupt into violence in the early days of a brash new right-wing government, but because the people who lived in St Paul's were <span style="font-style: italic;">not like us</span>. And by extension, even on a calm sunny day with the birdies singing, we would no more drive through St Paul's than go swimming with sharks.
<br />
<br />I don't think I've ever heard either of my parents express a directly, explicitly racist thought. They just had certain assumptions, with which they in their turn had been brought up. The encapsulating anecdote, I suppose, would be the time -- I think this would have been about 1984 or so -- when my mother returned from shopping one day in a state of considerable dudgeon and fluster, having asked an assistant in John Lewis for material in a colour that she was accustomed to referring to as "n----r brown", and been told pretty emphatically that this was no longer an acceptable formulation. What upset her about the episode was not that she felt this was an instance of what would much later be described by the <span style="font-style: italic;">Daily Mail </span>(which she read every day) and suchlike as "political correctness gone mad", but she was aghast at the imputation that her intention had been racist, when to her mind it was nothing of the sort. She simply hadn't thought about it that way. I suspect underneath it all she was mortified at having given offence. (She was my mum so I'm prepared to give her the benefit of the doubt; she was not an unkind person. She <span style="font-style: italic;">was</span> complicated -- like all of us.)
<br />
<br />At the time of the St Paul's riot I'm pretty sure -- coming up to seven years old -- I had seen exactly three black people in real life. Two were girls -- sisters, maybe twins, I can't remember -- at my primary school, who were sort of cherished by us all in much the same way that my mother, as a child, had specifically asked for and cherished a black doll, and kept it carefully as an adult, tissue-papered and shoeboxed in her wardrobe; it was rare, she told me, which meant it was valuable. The other was a stranger. I would have been six, I guess. As I waited in the car for my mother to come back from the post office, I sat merrily playing my descant recorder; an elderly black man approached the car, peered in through the windscreen, beamed at me, and conducted my playing. I was terrified. When my mother came back, I told her what had happened, and cried. She comforted me, as shocked as if I had been mugged in the street. I can hear myself saying it now: "A black man looked at me." And sobbing.
<br />
<br />In this context it will perhaps sound absurd to suggest that my upbringing was anything other than racist -- and that's part of that flicker of doubt in the tiny pause before I tell you that I'm not -- but I was at secondary school, I think, before I ever heard anyone give voice to a sentiment that black people, or non-white people, were inferior or inherently flawed. As a child, two of my favourite tv presenters were black -- Derek Griffiths and Carmen Monroe -- and there was never any anxiety about that at home. Because they were <span style="font-style: italic;">in</span> my home, I suppose. They were in our home, and on tv, which I suppose meant we knew that a nice white person somewhere had vetted them and decided they were polite enough to get into our home. In a sense, in almost every sense, this is plainly, thoroughly, irrecuperably racist. But it was part of a continuum on which were placed not only non-white people, but also effeminate men, French people, working-class northerners, people who swore, people with a lot of money, punks, evangelical Christians, topless women on beaches, people suspected of voting Labour, people with tattoos, people with bad table manners... The environment in which I grew up -- and in which many people grow up even now, of course -- was not so much racist, or not so much <span style="font-style: italic;">only </span>racist, as characterised by an intense, fixated discomfort around <span style="font-style: italic;">otherness</span>, in its 57 varieties. I wasn't brought up as a racist, exactly. I was brought up to be afraid. I was raised breathing fear.
<br />
<br />Of course by the time I was eight or nine I knew I had otherness in me, and as a consequence I was afraid of myself. I was ten when I gathered some friends around me in the playground and announced I was gay (and was astounded and frustrated by their lack of interest in the topic!) and although I didn't really realize the full implications of what that meant until I was slightly older, I certainly knew enough to know that this had to be secret at home. I had to continue to pass as a perfect fit for the cul-de-sac. I'll spare you the gory and yet cliche-obvious details, but: cue twenty-odd years of fear, weirdness, furtiveness, sadness, panic attacks, a suicide attempt, therapy, depression, eating disorder, more therapy, and only in my 30s something approaching happiness and almost-comfortableness in my own skin. <span style="font-style: italic;">Je suis un autre</span> and pass the salt please. Still, I learned to be homophobic before I knew I was gay, and that's still flickering away in the tiny pause; and if you think my insistence on describing myself -- for most intents and purposes -- as "queer" rather than "gay" isn't partly a trace of unresolved internalised homophobia, then you're madder than I am.
<br />
<br />The fortunate thing for me was that my professional interests more or less compelled me (as I saw it) to relocate to London after graduating. Fortunate because I think London saved my life -- by which I mean, I suppose, my life as I now live it. It has been possible to live here the kind of life that I want and need to live, and I don't know how many places there are of which that could be said. I love and relish the teeming otherness of London, even though I'm still a-buzz all day every day with the reflexes of my upbringing, even though I'm often (but in no more than a second or two) talking myself rationally down off a ledge of panic because there's a gang of kids in hoodies outside the newsagents or two bad trannies at the next table in the caff. My dad loves it too, funnily enough, when he comes to visit. I guess he's mellowed. Given the slightest prompt, he'll wax pretty lyrical about the 'melting pot' as we trundle around on the bus. Damn right, I think. Atta dad.
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<br />But for all the reflex twinges of an early life I'm still trying to shed, and I guess the occasional slightly heart-racing moment that you'd get in any urban environment after dark, I've only ever been genuinely scared by London three times.
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<br />Once, of course, was on 7/7, trying to get across London to meet colleagues, quite early in the morning, just as the disruption and rumour were starting to spread. The strangeness of the city that day was what scared me. Like seeing a familiar face with a sudden disfiguring mark or shadow. Phone networks coming in and out of service as we, thirty strangers, sat in unmoving traffic by Marble Arch, on the top deck of a bus, and I couldn't get through to anyone, and someone else sitting close by received a text that said Canary Wharf had been bombed. (Which -- for those who don't know the story -- it hadn't.) And then walking home from Paddington back to Stoke Newington. The streets full of people trudging on foot through neighbourhoods they'd only ever travelled beneath before. Getting back home and suddenly crying with fear and tiredness and no longer needing to keep a brave face in place. So sad that anyone would assault London, the great melting pot, the great city of people rubbing along together. So amazed that anyone wouldn't love the idea of people rubbing along together.
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<br />Another time I was scared was last night. We were coming back from the book launch in Brighton, due to arrive into London Bridge about quarter past midnight, and it was only once we were on the train that it dawned on me I might not be able to get my usual bus home from the station, because texts and tweets were coming through that things were kicking off again on Kingsland Road. And it was fine of course -- because we got in a cab -- because cash is still coming out of the ATM -- but for a few minutes I was shaken. Between where I was, in that moment, and my home, the city was burning. And of course I'm one of the incredibly lucky ones, I live in one of the safest, calmest neighbourhoods in north London; for plenty of people a mile or two either side, in Dalston and Hackney and Tottenham, what's happening now is happening on their doorsteps, not picturesquely in the distance or live on the BBC news channel (where I spent a few uncomfortable minutes watching a standoff unfold on Mare Street). If I were them, I'd be sick of people like me pontificating on this topic; I'm pretty sick of it anyway. In fact in a way the scariest thing about my experience of last night wasn't the disruption to my travel arrangements and the fear of what might be happening; it was getting home and skimming back through 500-odd tweets, and seeing so many people whose political instincts and personal capacities I'd trusted suddenly using language and expressing ideas that felt to me more abhorrent and estranging than anything that's happened so far on the streets.
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<br />And then the third time I can think of that scared me was not long after I moved to London, and after a brief, abortive spell in a houseful of Australian dentists in NW6, I relocated to a gay flatshare in King's Cross. (If there's one thing that's unlikely to soothe your internalised homophobia, let me tell you, it's a gay flatshare in King's Cross.) It was a tense neighbourhood, and there was weirdness afoot in the flat, and so I was in a constant state of slightly pressurized vigilance. Until one day, a few weeks in, I suddenly thought, I'm not going to live in this freaked-out state any more. I bet this area is basically fine, I thought, I'm going to go for a stroll and check it out and say hello to some people I don't know and it'll start to feel more like home. And it all worked out pretty well until, as I started to walk back towards the flat, I came to a junction, a car pulled up at traffic lights, and then another car alongside it. And two men got out of the second car, went over to the first, kicked the door in, dragged the driver out into the road and beat him with a wooden plank. I watched all of this, stupidly paralysed, but I don't know how it ended, because I guess I finally produced enough adrenalin that it became possible to walk away.
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<br />I've thought about that incident a lot in the past couple of days. I see me staring like a frightened bunny; I see the two men with the plank of wood; I see the guy in the car. There must have been other witnesses, though I don't see them in the picture. I think of how scared I was, and then I think about how much more scared the victim must have been. And then I think: who, in that picture, is the most frightened? It's the guys with the plank of wood. Right? It's them. Maybe they're not experiencing <span style="font-style: italic;">in that moment</span> the sensation of heart-pumping terror that the driver experiences; maybe they won't have the flashbacks that he'll have, assuming he survived. But those two people are living in a state, in a day-to-day condition whose fearfulness is so unremitting, so degrading, that it's taken them to a place where they feel like <span style="font-style: italic;">the best course of action</span> available to them, on that February afternoon, is to drag another guy out of his car and beat him with a plank of wood.
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<br />I suppose there are some workings I need to show. I need to say that I don't believe in "evil", at least as a kind of supernatural force, and I don't believe in innate wickedness. I think this, because it seems to me to be the only way of working from a basic premise of equality between human beings (and if we don't believe that then I have no idea where else to begin and where else to draw the line): that people are born into and live their lives in different contexts and conditions, but that everyone is doing the best they can with the information and resources and opportunities available to them. That no one acts deliberately against their own interests, and that all actions are produced out of specific circumstances. Whether you spend your fortieth birthday taking your kids to a petting zoo or running amok on a killing spree (or, I suppose, exactly half way between the two, flipping burgers at Burger King), you do this because a hard-to-decipher complex of past actions and present circumstances has led you to believe this is the best available option today: even when those behaviours may be superficially self-defeating or self-harming. People do what works. Those with few resources, few opportunities and scant information at their disposal may act in ways that are inexplicable and devastating to others -- not only to others who have more<span style="font-style: italic;"> </span>of those things, but to others who may have as little or even less but who for whatever reason find they're in a position to not act so harmfully.
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<br />This should make me more tolerant, of course -- of everybody, in general, but I'm thinking especially about people I'm feeling angry with today because their response to the present situation in London has been so much less than I think it could have been. Those people are doing, and saying, what works for them, just as I am. But what I can at least do is say some stuff about what I disagree with, and why, and what I'd like to propose instead, and this, in its incredibly small way, changes the context in which some of us put the next foot forward (or choose not to).
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<br />The language of intense, desperate <span style="font-style: italic;">otherness </span>has been, for me, the most difficult aspect of this series of disturbances (and let me say, it's now a little after 2pm and I'm hearing sirens again, so this is not a reflection on past events, but an attempt to make some calmer space in the midst of chaos<span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"></span></span>). I know one shouldn't turn to Twitter for nuanced debate -- or tv, for that matter, or pretty much anywhere -- but I'm so sad and ashamed to hear rioters described as "scum", for example, or as "vermin": both words that friends have used, shockingly, in the past few hours. Emotions are high, of course, but if it's in these moments that you see what people are actually carrying around with them, then this has already been a jarring revelation. Our compulsion to distance ourselves from acts with which we do not wish to be associated (no matter how complicit we may be in their occasioning, and no matter how aware we are, at a deep and perhaps profoundly suppressed level, of that complicity) makes us want to insert this spurious discontinuity into our rhetoric, but it makes meaningful further engagement impossible if we say that the people who've been rioting and looting the past few days are anything other than people. They're just people; and I suspect, scary though these times are for all of us, those "scumbag" perpetrators are the most frightened people on the block. This, partly, is what makes us reach for the animal metaphors: the media's absurd condemn/condone binary -- which a large number of people seem to have absorbed as if it were a natural order -- is as useless for thinking about frightened people as it would be for thinking about frightened animals; and moreover, of course, we want our fear to be distinct from <span style="font-style: italic;">their </span>fear, we want our fear to be more elevated than theirs, so we want to reclassify them as less human than us.
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<br />The frequent reference to rioters as "animals", though, is at least suggestive. Think of Martin Luther King's famous 1968 speech 'The Other America':
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<br /><blockquote>I’m still convinced that nonviolence is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom and justice. I feel that violence will only create more social problems than they will solve. That in a real sense it is impractical for the Negro to even think of mounting a violent revolution in the United States. So I will continue to condemn riots, and continue to say to my brothers and sisters that this is not the way. And continue to affirm that there is another way.
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<br />But at the same time, it is as necessary for me to be as vigorous in condemning the conditions which cause persons to feel that they must engage in riotous activities as it is for me to condemn riots. I think America must see that riots do not develop out of thin air. Certain conditions continue to exist in our society which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots. But in the final analysis, <span style="font-style: italic;">a riot is the language of the unheard</span>. [my emphasis]
<br /></blockquote>
<br />What I take King to be saying here -- not that this is an original thought, plenty of other commentators have said the same -- is not simply that if people feel they are not being heard, they will have recourse to rioting and spectacular violence. (I'm reluctant to just say 'violence' because violence exists in this picture at so many levels, and the ways in which it's so embedded and familiar as to have become practically invisible need continually to show up in the accounts, if our civic concern is to mean anything at all.)
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<br />No, more than that I think he means to suggest is that rioters are unheard <span style="font-style: italic;">even in the midst of rioting</span>. What is expressed in spontaneous riots (to the degree that these third- and fourth-day disturbances count as spontaneous) is so inarticulate in itself that we cannot really hear anything other than the chaos and mayhem and the boiling of our own angry fear and defensiveness. And so in this sense, rioters quite precisely assume the status of animals. We cannot understand what it is that they are trying to tell us. ("What is it, Lassie?") We know that they are in a state of excitation, but we do not truly comprehend what it is they are saying. When I went out this morning to get a few groceries, a young woman was standing in the street shouting at her very young child, who had started to whimper as he waited to be let into their car. "I don't know why you're crying!" she yelled. "What's wrong with you?" She was absolutely livid. It could hardly have felt more horribly apropos.
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<br />Of course it may be -- in many cases I'm sure it is -- that those who are out on the streets chucking missiles and setting fires don't know what's "wrong with them", either. They were just going along in one way, not rioting, and then something happened, and then they were rioting. This is not to say that there is no cause: but if a single cause could be expressed in words, say, and if those same people felt that words were among the resources they had at their disposal, then perhaps they'd be making speeches and printing leaflets. But in the midst of material deprivation many also live in a state of linguistic poverty. Words fail them.
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<br />My wonderful friend Karl James has recently <a href="http://understandingdifference.blogspot.com/2011/08/generous-descriptions.html">posted a remarkable podcast on his blog</a>, an interview with a guy called Anjelo, discussing experiences of pain. As Karl notes -- and as others have observed, most brilliantly perhaps Elaine Scarry in her extraordinary <span style="font-style: italic;">The Body In Pain</span>, one of maybe a dozen books that have absolutely changed the way I look at the world -- part of the difficulty with pain is that it's desperately hard to communicate. The experience of "indescribable pain" is compounded by the loneliness of exactly that, its being so hard to describe in such a way that others will comprehend your pain. Karl talks about the importance and the generosity of making the effort to describe your experience carefully. I particularly like what Karl says in his introduction to the podcast:
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<br /><blockquote>I often talk with people about putting energy and effort and commitment into the way you describe something, because in that way we can share experiences, we can help others to get a feel and an idea of what it was to be somewhere that [they] weren't. </blockquote>
<br />I'm not sure that Karl will be totally comfortable with me quoting this passage in this context and as part of this argument, but I know he'll respect the nature of the thought-process. Because what strikes me is this: the energy of these riots could hardly seem further removed from the commitment to carefulness and generosity that he's describing. But I wonder if, in a sense, this is not what we're seeing: an outburst of energy -- albeit uncontrolled, unfocused, convulsive -- that's simply giving us a rare and horrifyingly accurate description of pain that cannot be described any other way.
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<br />There's <a href="http://www.twitvid.com/4JTZH">a great video</a> doing the rounds of an angry woman remonstrating with rioters in Hackney: "If we're fighting for a cause, let's fight for a fucking cause!" -- but there is no cause that she can see and no cause that the rioters can articulate for themselves: and on the same grounds elsewhere we see those who have been involved in legitimate organized street protest distancing themselves from the actions of these violent mixed-up kids.
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<br />Except that there <span style="font-style: italic;">is</span> a cause, isn't there? -- it's the cause of not wanting to live like this any more: and some of us are privileged enough (though these are surely rights rather than privileges) that we've been given enough information and sufficient resources to have been able to conduct our own independent inquiries into the way the world turns, and as a result we're in a position to be able to name that cause as capitalism. And though I know I have to keep rejecting the condone/condemn arcade game that we're all incessantly offered, I do at some level see that, at the apex of their translatability into human language, these riots are an extraordinarily emphatic 'no'. And this post is also a 'no', and almost all of the work I do is trying, one way or another, to voice that same 'no'. And what I hear from those friends and colleagues who are so appalled and affronted that their getting-by has been disrupted by these incidents is something other than 'No' to capitalism. It is 'yes, but...'. The 'yes, but...' of mitigated capitalism, in which there is just enough social justice and economic parity for them to continue to be comfortable but feel less guilty about it and less weary living within it: the weariness that comes from knowing that we all (but some of us ever so much more than others) <span style="font-style: italic;">make</span> capitalism, every day, by participating in it; for every inch by which we mitigate it through our charitable efforts and online petitions and community spirit, we take a mile of its unequally distributed benefits. And it is the knowledge that we currently depend so irrecuperably on our own participation in capitalism that makes us fearful and angry at moments like this. I heard plenty of people describing the rioters as "stupid" yesterday, as if, again, stupidity were innate in people. But stupidity, like its opposites, is a property of relationships, and we participate in its construction. If they are stupid it's because they are stupefied: most of the year round, that's how it suits us. And so we hold up as an index of their "stupidity" the fact that some of the early targets were shoe shops and sports shops from which trainers could be looted: as if this in itself shows up the vacuity at the heart of the trouble. But we know, surely, that we taught them this language. We taught them its syntax and its symbology and now it is spat back at us in a weird vituperative parody of itself. The scramble for cool trainers is an ugly, pitiful power grab -- but it was ugly last week when they were queueing to pay, just as much as it is now that they're helping themselves.
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<br />Fear underscores all our lives under capitalism. For those who have, the fear of what we have to lose; for those who don't, the fear that we will always be subjugated by those who do. And by "have", I don't simply refer to material standards of living, but to capital more generally, to power. Those who are most afraid today are those with the most power, because they have the most to lose. The rioters have grabbed some temporary power and I bet they're truly disoriented by it. David Cameron and his rioting nemeses are, maybe just for today, truly and genuinely all in this together, frightened rabbits, and between themselves and their home (which in Cameron's case, of course, he's just flown back to from holiday), the city is burning.
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<br />But those of us caught in the middle need -- in the words of that woman on the video -- to "get real" too. I'm genuinely disturbed by all the variants I've heard in the past couple of days on that famous, almost uniquely <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/major-on-crime-condemn-more-understand-less-1474470.html">deplorable phrase</a> that John Major balefully uttered in February 1993 in the wake of the murder of James Bulger: "Society needs to condemn a little more and understand a little less." (Any thoughts that we should at least be grateful for the acknowledgement, <span style="font-style: italic;">pace</span> his predecessor, that there <span style="font-style: italic;">is</span> such a thing as society, might be tempered by Cameron's hopeless "Big Society": it's a straight line graph, going up, sure, but the y-axis is labelled entirely with zeros.) Stop excusing this behaviour, came the message from left right and centre yesterday, just condemn it.
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<br />Of course we have enough to lose ourselves that it's little wonder we'd rather not pursue the line of "understanding" any further. But this just seems to bring me back to something I've said here (and elsewhere) several times in the past few weeks. It's not that we don't understand what the riots are "telling" us. (These riots need analysis, not interpretation, but on we go.) It's not that we don't know. We've known it all along, but most of us don't live in a place -- physically or psychically -- where we're actually compelled to confront what we know; nor do we have a safe place in which to voluntarily acknowledge what we know, in an effort of carefulness and generosity. -- I very much <span style="font-style: italic;">don't</span> want this to turn into a theatre-related post, let alone a 'theatre to the rescue' post. I've felt absolutely impotent as an artist in the past few days because the kind of space that I need to start from is not the kind of space that feels as though it has any cultural validity at the moment: we just need to be preparing these spaces, one way and another, for when the present crisis passes (assuming it does; if it does, it clearly won't for long), and the exhausted combatants on all sides are ready to make acknowledgements and reparations of their own.
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<br />I don't know, or can't say, whether these riots are, finally, justified or defensible. If I say I think they are, I'm projecting. Certainly I don't think they're inexplicable, or wanton; and above all, I think they're information, and they need treating as such. We need to step outside the meagre reactionary game-playing of condone/condemn and face both an unpalatable truth and a task. The truth is, we're seeing clear signals absolutely everywhere, not just in London and throughout the UK -- where, let's remember, these disturbances are still relatively minor stuff compared with the aggression we've unleashed on other countries and the unrest that has been precipitated in our names -- that our addiction to the behaviours and relationships that capitalism engenders and fixes has now come to a point where it's hurting us badly and unsustainably; and I think we know this. I don't think anyone doesn't, at some level, beneath however-many layers of fear and defensiveness. And so our task is to acknowledge that we know it and proceed from there.
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<br />I've dealt with an addiction or two myself and what we know -- again, I'm sure everybody <span style="font-style: italic;">basically </span>knows this -- is that you won't necessarily kick it just because you know you <span style="font-style: italic;">should</span>, and you won't necessarily stop it just because other people tell you that you <span style="font-style: italic;">must</span>. You have to get to the point where you wake up one morning and say: "I cannot live like this any more. I cannot do this one more day."
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<br />You may disagree with my sense that that's what we're being told by these gangs of young people, in this violent, desperate, outraged language they picked up from overhearing the secrets we were muttering behind our hands. But actually, it's not them that I'm talking about.
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<br />We won't get the change we need until the people who live in safe neighbourhoods like mine, and in the hockey-shaped cul-de-sacs up and down the country where well-meaning people incubate their fear of others who aren't exactly like them, wake up one morning and say: I know what I know, and I'm so tired, and I need someone to understand the pain I'm in, and I cannot live like this any more. I cannot do this one more day.
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<br />As artists, we can hasten that day; as people with language skills, we can hasten that day; as people who are [tick] Other, we can hasten that day, and make it a day of celebration rather than mourning. And there will be rioting and looting and that too, I hope, will hasten that day, even though it may initially seem counterproductive -- unfortunately, we won't get to <span style="font-style: italic;">that</span> point on tea and biscuits alone. There <span style="font-style: italic;">will</span> be rioting, there <span style="font-style: italic;">is</span> rioting, and, because of the information and resources and opportunities that I've got in my life, I hate the fear that that rioting gives rise to, as much as I hate the fear from which it arises; and thankfully I have other tools than fire and missiles with which to add my own voice to the big and necessary "no". But I will <span style="font-style: italic;">not </span>condone, I <span style="font-style: italic;">will</span> unreservedly condemn, any effort to dehumanize the people who are fighting on the streets, or to say that they are lesser people for it. What they're doing is sad, and ugly, and terrible, and it's exactly what we ask for by dint of our reluctance to acknowledge what we know, and to act accordingly.
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<br />As the saying goes, we can all be better teachers.
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<br />Chris Goodehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17993698000314709291noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28051672.post-79197207325500302732011-08-07T00:52:00.002+01:002011-08-07T01:09:51.427+01:00"Why don't we just do it with our voices?": a moment in time with cris cheek<div></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-JpRTbGaWPxg/Tj1woFbZ5-I/AAAAAAAACts/fRu8M8Sz0h8/s1600/cheek-cris_Ch-Bernstein_11-19-08_NYC_05.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-JpRTbGaWPxg/Tj1woFbZ5-I/AAAAAAAACts/fRu8M8Sz0h8/s320/cheek-cris_Ch-Bernstein_11-19-08_NYC_05.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5637786142491928546" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:85%;">cris cheek at the Poetry Project, St Mark's Church, NY, November 2008<br />Photo: Charles Bernstein<br /></span></div><br /><br /><br />cris cheek is, to the best of my recollection, the only poet on whom I've ever cut my lip.<br /><br />It happened at a performance I did with Jamie Wood in Cambridge in 2005. This was the first of the portmanteau recitals I've been doing in recent years: Jamie did Fluxus pieces while I simultaneously read bits of Christopher Knowles and Jackson Mac Low and Bruce Nauman and Erik Belgum and suchlike, and a very special attendee stepped out of the audience to <a href="http://oudste-manneken-pis.be/">intervene</a> in Jamie's rendering of Alison Knowles's <span style="font-style: italic;">Proposition #1</span> (the result: not so much a salad, more a pissaladière).<br /><br />It felt to me important and reassuring that cris was present for that event, as it was in one sense unthinkable without him. Those outside the experimental (or scare-quotesy label of your choice) poetry scene might be surprised at how "queasy" (to borrow John Wilkinson's apposite word) some regions of it still are when it comes to certain kinds of performance, and to the kinds of hybridities and cross-pollinations to which a performative project -- especially in relation to multiple or contested textualities -- is apt to give rise. Fabulous irritant Kent Johnson's <a href="http://htmlgiant.com/random/our-notions-of-experiment-are-pretty-much-stuck-on-the-surface-of-the-page-an-interview-with-kent-johnson/">fantastic recent interview with Christopher Higgs</a> (h/t Dennis Cooper for the link) gives some hints as to why: the private and unitary author function still underwrites so much of our self-perception as poets, and the embrace of the performative threatens everywhere to disrupt that privacy.<br /><br />Anyway, when I was coming out onto the scene as a poetry ingenue, a little over a decade ago, picking my unsteady way through my own cat's cradle of intertangled interests -- in theatre, in live art, in poetry, in visual art, in sound, in film, and in every spur and pseudopodium of nonstandard writing practice -- I knew nothing about this state of affairs, and figured everyone would feel as I did about the intimate adjacency of interesting poetry to every other interesting thing; and it was amazing to see instead that there was just this pretty small clutch of poets, mostly undervalued in their field (especially by a clunking-fisted phalanx of straight white middle-class postgraduate males who fancied themselves robustly installed as -- impossibly -- both gatekeepers to and epicentrists within this irretrievably marginal territory), who were seeking to hold open, and defend against hostility and strenuous embarrassed inhospitality, a space where performance (as opposed to "reading", as if reading weren't a genre of performance in itself) and the present body and the contingencies of liveness and the choreographic valency of text-as-mark and glyph-as-gesture could go to work without occlusion, could display their vital signs without immediately falling foul of a British Bulldog pile-on from those who were most heavily invested, professionally and personally, in the maintenance of stable scholarly normativities.<br /><br />Alongside key figures in this little tribe, such as Caroline Bergvall, Lawrence Upton and the late Alaric Sumner (with all of whom I quickly made fruitful contact, for which in every case I'm still grateful, and increasingly so), cris cheek was always right there in the thick of it: showing up not only in the real-world places where the least boring things were likely to happen, but also, as an inveterate early adopter, in a multiverse of online spaces -- discussion lists and the like -- where all manner of toss was forever being argued, often histrionically and with ill temper: in which contexts he always retained a distinctive voice: fluent, playful (perhaps sometimes to a fault, or anyway beyond the elastic limit of some colleagues' tolerance), generous, informed, questioning, annoying, quick to laughter. No loose thread would escape his tug, and much that was held dear by the prefects could be watched easily unravelling as a result of his sometimes mischievous talent for enquiry and provocation.<br /><br />And so a performance collage such as <span style="font-style: italic;">Mixed Ape -- </span>which stacked up poems, performance texts, instruction pieces, artists' writings, Fluxus compositions, computer-generated prose, queer burbles and transcribed vocal improvisations cheek-if-you'll-pardon-the-expression-by-jowl -- felt viable at all, let alone plausible or productive, only because restlessly inventive figures such as cris had for years been putting their <a href="http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mariosaviosproulhallsitin.htm">bodies on the gears and wheels</a>. If this was misunderstood by the prefecture (for whom only Brian Catling, for some reason, ever really had a dispensation), perhaps it was partly because the project of cheek and his allies was misperceived as an attempt to create a freakish mutant poetry, covered in absurd and irrelevant prostheses and ungainly and stumbling as a result; I suspect cris might feel, as I do, more, and more simply, that the movement between forms and modes is <span style="font-style: italic;">not </span>frictionless, but that much that is indicative and alive with information is generated by that friction.<br /><br />Well, so, anyway, cris, as he's inclined to do, gave me a pre-show good-luck bearhug, in the commission of which the zip of his fleece lacerated my lip, and I started the performance a few minutes late and still bleeding slightly. This may or may not be a good anecdote in itself, but it's certainly The Little Metaphor That Could. cris cheek, it could be argued, is to "cut lip" as the genius queer novelist <a href="http://www.tomspanbauer.com/">Tom Spanbauer</a> is to "burnt tongue". Here, Spanbauer's protégé Chuck Palahniuk (<span style="font-style: italic;">Fight Club </span>et al) defines the "burnt tongue" technique as it's taught in Spanbauer's famous 'Dangerous Writing' workshops:<br /><br /><blockquote>A way of saying something, but saying it wrong, twisting it to slow down the reader. Forcing the reader to read close, maybe read twice, not just skim along a surface of abstract images...<br /><div style="text-align: right;"><a href="http://www.laweekly.com/2002-09-26/art-books/she-breaks-your-heart/"><span style="font-style: italic;">from an L.A. Weekly article on Amy Hempel</span></a><br /></div></blockquote><br />Actually, though the "saying it wrong" part fits nicely, cheek might also be rather at home with abstract images and surface-skimming: without Spanbauer's devotion to narrative to service, a kind of omnidirectional mobility becomes not only possible but desirable. cheek's work often records the patterns and instants of real liveness, the extemporised, the dependent: but the pressures of time and space are repeatedly folded, spindled, mutilated, into a multiplicity that granulates, often finally liquefying altogether. Again, this is often mistaken for a pomo (porno?) inattentivity, an unwillingness to engage with historic conditions and named names: whereas in fact cheek is actually seeking new surfaces, new multidimensional jotters, on which to capture at a radical level of decentred fidelity the movements of voice across social distances, as they happen now, and as they may or may not continue to happen in the panoply of potential futures that every furiously heterogeneous 'now' contains.<br /><br />We don't see much of cris these days: he's installed as <a href="http://www.units.muohio.edu/english/People/Faculty/A_H/cheekcris.html">Associate Professor in the Department of English</a> at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio -- an environment in which the promiscuity of his interdisciplinary speculation obviously doesn't cause the kind of wig-outs that it too often has in poor old riven Blighty. We met and chatted in the foyer of the Royal Festival Hall (a suitably demotic venue, I felt) the day before a special event hosted at Birkbeck, University of London, and comprising two complementary units: a talk from cheek, entitled "Before I Am Anything Else: provisional transatlantic communities in polyvocal poetic performance"; and then "Friendly Amendments", a very informal, experimental gathering of performers (including cheek, <a href="http://www.hollypester.com/">Holly Pester</a>, <a href="http://www.gold.ac.uk/music/staff/l-upton/">Lawrence Upton</a>, Jonny Liron and myself, among others) around a number of texts -- by Jackson Mac Low, bpnichol, Bob Cobbing and Michael Basinski -- composed with polyvocal rendering in mind (or, in the case of Basinski, <span style="font-style: italic;">not</span> with polyvocal rendering <span style="font-style: italic;">not</span> in mind). The notion of "provisional community" has cheek's at once rigorous and super-permissive politics and poetics pent up inside it like all the yet-to-be-written tags that quietly seethe inside a can of neon spraypaint.<br /><br />But before we got around to talking about poetry and polyvocality, there was a whole other body of work to discuss (and no other poet comes so close to encapsulating the phase "body of work"), ranging across poetry both written and unwritten, dance and sound and participatory art and all cheek's other activities that, taken together, seem to endorse beyond even the most hidebound Cantabridgian doubt the view sometimes attributed to William Forsythe that <span style="font-style: italic;">everything</span> is choreography. Two long, wildly productive personal/artistic relationships -- with Sianed Jones, in and out of projects like their band Slant, with legendary turntablist Philip Jeck; and with Kirsten Lavers, cheek's partner in the radiantly interstitial Things Not Worth Keeping -- fall into place in a timeline that is abundantly crosshatched with what seem like a hundred thousand meetings and conversations with almost everyone who's done anything worthwhile in the past fifty years.<br /><br />I, meanwhile, was just back from doing <span style="font-style: italic;">Open House</span> in Leeds, and feeling more energised than ever at the possibilities -- indeed, the present realities -- of "provisional community" in theatre: and so, a little unexpectedly, that's where the conversation began...<br /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/0N4JQMM-H3s?rel=0" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="390" width="480"></iframe><br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span>cris cheek at Writing for their Lives, University of Washington-Bothell, 1o February 2010</span></span><br /></div><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">* * *<br /></div><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">CG:</span> I wasn’t going to start here, but seeing as we’re here...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">cc:</span> Yes, go on. Go on, do whatever you want to do!<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Do you have much use for theatre?</span><br /><br />Ha ha! Mmm... dear... [laughs] Now I know we’re going to have a funny conversation about it because I know that when you start talking about what you think theatre is, I think yeah that sounds great!<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Yeah, that’s all right – let’s have your conversation first!</span><br /><br />...I go sometimes to see – in Cincinatti there’s a Shakespeare..., it’s a kind of indie Shakespeare... There’s a bunch of us that go down and see Shakespeare productions every now and again. And since I was a kid I’ve seen Shakespeare productions so I’m revisiting some of these things. And I go with a bunch of early modernists, early modern scholars, and most of them are way over-excited about Shakespeare in every possible way. Although I can understand why they’re interested historically, as literary critics and so forth.<br /><br />Um, I have, and always have, with very very few exceptions, had real trouble with the conventional pros arch play. ...Now, why don’t I like it?<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Yeah, why don’t you?</span><br /><br />Because if I go to the Barbican for example, and I go and I walk and I sit in a seat and then those gates close at the end of the aisles, there’s... To me it symbolizes that I’ve just been trapped.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Yeah.</span><br /><br />So that’s one reason why I don’t like it, is because I feel, er, trapped into... a communal experience of artifice. Which I suppose will be another way of talking about all the stuff that gets into <span style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord/">The Society of the Spectacle</a>.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Yeah, OK.</span><br /><br />I do have that problem and I particularly don’t like, generally, seeing people pretending to be other people on stage. I would really rather watch the cleaner sweeping the stage, or the stagehands changing the set.<br /><br />Now, there are exceptions to this. So what are they?<br /><br />Well, sometimes I’ve experienced seeing that format taken to what I saw as a kind of logical extreme. Under <a href="http://www.cricoteka.pl/en/">Kantor</a>, for example. Watching <span style="font-style: italic;">The Dead Class</span> and just feeling that the presence of the totalitarian director as the mediating afficionado between the audience and the performers – who are all literally playing dead, and being controlled by the puppet-master – took the critique into a place that I felt comfortable. It became so grim as an experience that I found it utterly compelling.<br /><br />I’ve never seen Grotowski live, but I <span style="font-style: italic;">have </span>seen Grotowski on film and I find that laughable. I can’t get into that at all. Kantor really had some sense of... stillness at the heart of his work that I found really interesting. And it became closer to performance art.<br /><br />Now if we’re talking about performance art – which I know could be put into a theatrical frame – I’d say I’m very interested in performance art, of all kinds: whether it be <a href="http://ronatheynews.blogspot.com/">Ron Athey</a> having a full-blown enema on stage right in front of you, or...<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">...or not! [laughs]</span><br /><br />...or <a href="http://stelarc.org/">Stelarc</a> – or not! And... things that are more kind of... what you’d call site-specific theatre. Um... I’m trying to think about big grand things that I saw, like <a href="http://www.stationhouseopera.com/">Station House Opera</a>, and even earlier on, <a href="http://www.fionatempleton.org/The%20Theatre%20of%20Mistakes.htm">The Ting: Theatre of Mistakes</a>—<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Yeah, yeah.</span><br /><br />The kind of thing that <a href="http://www.anthonyhowell.org/">Anthony Howell</a> used to do with <a href="http://www.fionatempleton.org/">Fiona Templeton</a>, and... These sort of more task-based things, I found those very interesting. And I also got an edge of that when – and we’re going back a long time – I saw a <a href="http://www.robertwilson.com/">Robert Wilson</a> production at the... Woo! What’s the name of the theatre in Sloane Square?<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">The Royal Court.</span><br /><br />The Royal Court. Um... And I saw some Beckett at the Royal Court, I saw Billie Whitelaw doing <span style="font-style: italic;">Not I</span> which I thought was fantastic. And I saw... I did see Glenda Jackson in a Eugene O’Neill play, and I thought she was incredible.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Is that about there being a kind of force of will or personality or charisma or something that breaks through that sort of matrix that you don’t like?</span><br /><br />What I liked about her was that I could see layers of the thinking going on inside her performance. It felt more interesting to me.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">OK, so that’s a kind of degree of reality in a way, if you’re seeing a real thinking process...?</span><br /><br />I guess. I guess.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">I totally agree with you, I love seeing people think on stage.</span><br /><br />I guess, yeah, I guess there is something to do with that. There’s something to do with just the kind of... more what I would think of as jobbing acting, that I don’t find so interesting. Just as I find mimes... you know, tough to chew.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">[laughs] Yeah! So we were just talking a little bit about... We were touching in with some work I suppose in a... if we’re going to be coarse about it, a sort of poetry frame, that does play with, um..., artifice and possibly with kind of confected voices...</span><br /><br />Yeah. Good word. Did you say ‘cathected’ or ‘confected’?<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Confected.</span><br /><br />You did say ‘confected’.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">...And [poetic] work that seems in some ways anyway energised by some of the things that, when you see them in a theatre context, you feel a bit allergic to. So is it about what you’re asked to do in a theatre as a kind of a... So I know Charles Bernstein, for example, made this distinction – I don’t know whether it was </span><span>specifically</span><span style="font-style: italic;"> in relation to you and your work, but – making a distinction between an </span><span>active</span><span style="font-style: italic;"> audience and a </span><span>consuming</span><span style="font-style: italic;"> audience... </span><a href="#note1"><span style="font-weight: bold;">[1] </span></a><a name="back1"></a><span style="font-style: italic;">So is there a thing about being asked in a theatre to be a consumer, who has nothing less to do? There’s that thing you quoted from James Yarker...</span> <a href="#note2"><span style="font-weight: bold;">[2]</span></a><a name="back2"></a><br /><br />Um... Well maybe what you’re saying is what I think. But I’m going to try and come at it another way. Which is that when I see, for example, the poet holding – not always, but mostly – something, or in some relation to a sense that there’s a text that they’re looking at, and that they’re navigating live for me, I feel much more compelled into the moment than I do, generally, when somebody has memorized a bunch of lines and is pretending to be somebody else. If it’s the poet on stage I feel that they’re doing something that has a... Yeah, maybe we’re going to get to the nature of the definition of <span style="font-style: italic;">task</span>. There’s a certain kind of task going on, which is, they’re trying to bring that text to me. And so there’s all the stuff, that you get with a musician too, of the edges of improvisation. There’s always these micro-edges of improvisation. Whereas what I tend to feel with somebody who’s learned something by rote, and maybe is not so brilliant at what they’re doing, they don’t <span style="font-style: italic;">particularly</span> embody it, they don’t really give you very much... I mean I’m not into the whole sort of, er, problem of somebody not having a clear idea of what their motivation is on stage. I don’t mean to go there. But there’s no sense of them just <span style="font-style: italic;">being there</span>.<br /><br />OK, so <a href="http://www.jacksonmaclow.com/">Jackson Mac Low</a>, one of the wonderful conversations I had with him was about <span style="font-style: italic;">The Marrying Maiden</span>, which was a text that he wrote for the Living Theatre in, I don’t know, ’65 or so. <a href="#note3"><span style="font-weight: bold;">[3]</span></a> <a name="back3"></a>I think they performed it every night for something like six months in New York. When you look at the text, it’s a mania of instruction. So there’s almost a different instruction after every single word. That you’re supposed to say this word as if you’ve just been goosed, and you’re supposed to say that word as if, er..., you’ve just seen a goose, and you’re supposed to say the following word as if you are a goose, or whatever. It’s not that funny, actually! But it’s that kind of thing. Now I said to Jackson, that’s impossible! And he just started to cackle. And he said, Yeah, you know, what I found is that I could arrive at indeterminacy through overdetermination.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Mmm. Yeah.</span><br /><br />So maybe – to come back to what you were saying earlier – maybe I do like some semblance of the fact that there’s something real being grappled with. Rather than that I’m watching the outcome of an enormous amount of... A rehearsal in which there’s no longer a struggle. If there’s a struggle as the result, at the end of the rehearsal, then I think it’s pretty interesting. And then for me it gets closer to performance, performance art: something is “happening” on the stage, there’s some “event” going on or whatever – I’m using all those kinds of words! – but if it’s a bunch of people who’ve basically just learned their lines and that’s their job, and that’s all they do is to move from one play to the next, I think I’m not so interested.<br /><br />It’s one of the reasons why I like, or used to like, Ballets C de la B, and things like that, is because there would be non-dancers in it, for example. So you get these tensions opening up, rather than it being a seamless artifice that’s delivered with skill and virtuosity by people who’ve had the right training and so forth. I like it when it gets a bit more gritty than that. So that kind of theatre experience, I have to say, yeah, particularly in those kinds of environments, particularly at those kinds of ticket prices, particularly with those kinds of audiences that can regularly afford those ticket prices, and are looking for that form of, um... lily-livered catharsis delivered to them at a distance in a theatre, I don’t find so interesting.<br /><br />But I love going to the movies, so pick the bones out of that!<br /><br />You see with the movies you get really close up on things. You see inside <a href="http://www.makemeheal.com/gossip/2006/11/brad-pitts-ear-surgery-for-dumbo-ear.html">Brad Pitt’s ear</a> or something.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Exactly, yes! Where else would you want to look?</span><br /><br />That’s got its vicarious thrills, yeah. I mean, even if everything else that’s going on isn’t very interesting, there’s generally something I can concentrate on that’s fun.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">So this makes me want to ask you about hybridity.</span><br /><br />[laughs]<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Is that all right?</span><br /><br />That’s fine, yeah. Whatever!<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Because I’m thinking that... I love film as well, I don’t see as much as I wish I did, but it’s an experience I love. I feel very like you about theatre, actually, that I want the signs of liveness to be strong and engaging, and so for that reason – and this has been on my mind in relation to Robert Lepage’s new show, which I haven’t seen... He’s arguing more and more for the idea that in order for theatre to survive it needs to become more cinematic. And I feel very...</span><br /><br />Dubious about that.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Yeah, very dubious.</span><br /><br />I have to say I did see an incredible Robert Lepage piece in Quebec.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Yeah, I think he’s amazing. He’s been a real hero for me.</span><br /><br />He’s been playing with film for a long while, though.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">He has, but I think there’s a kind of a drift... So, for example, Complicite, a company I love very much, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen them – and their early work very much coming partly out of that tradition of Kantor and the kind of grotesque, and very fluid...</span><br /><br />Yeah yeah. Simon [McBurney]’s getting some interesting work in film these days.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Yeah, well, I think he’s always been very interested particularly in screens; the work for a while has been very much about moving screens around...</span><br /><br />Mm-hmm.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">And I’ve started to find their work really unsatisfying at a theatrical level partly because the amount of work that they’re doing with screens and with video and incorporating that kind of stuff means that their work is very timecoded.</span><br /><br />Right. Ah!<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">So the room for it to be genuinely live in, and responsive to my presence there as an active member of an audience, is very limited. So I kind of... You know, if we were to have a very brief and reductive conversation about this, I would say that I wanted theatre to be more like theatre and film to be more like film, and the idea of a cinematic theatre bothers me because I think where those things meet, um... I think exciting things might come out but also I think a lot of problematic things might come out. I suppose I have a question... because you’re someone who, I think, when I was first encountering your work, there was a big exciting rush for me about the possibilities of hybridity.</span><br /><br />Yeah. Still doing that!<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">So I wonder...</span><br /><br />Well I’ll come to the hybridity. There’s one other thing I wanted to say about the theatre thing, then, I think, which is... A couple of other examples of things I have found interesting in theatre.<br /><br />I’ve mentioned the site-specific thing, I know it was a bit of a craze and I don’t even know if it’s happening very much any more, I don’t get a chance to see it, although over the past couple of years I’ve seen <a href="http://www.markjefferyartist.org/collaboration.html">Mark Jeffery and Judd Morrissey</a> do really exciting pieces that are quite specifically tailored.<br /><br />But no I’m thinking about other things that I like, that I’ve liked, that would be much more specifically within a theatrical frame; why do I like them?<br /><br />The Wooster Group, <a href="http://www.thewoostergroup.org/twg/twg.php?lsd-just-the-high-points"><span style="font-style: italic;">L.S.D.</span></a> was an incredible experience for me – of theatre – because they were grappling with simultaneity and, um..., multiple frames of activity, but without putting themselves into a timeline, other than struggling with the hilarity of some of the things they had to do to extricate themselves from legal prosecution. So, for example, asking Arthur Miller if they could do the chunks of <span style="font-style: italic;">The Crucible</span> and him saying no leads them to compacting <span style="font-style: italic;">The Crucible</span> and doing it incredibly fast and it just becomes hysterically funny.<br /><br />Or arguably something like <a href="http://www.forcedentertainment.com/page/145/Speak-Bitterness/100"><span style="font-style: italic;">Speak Bitterness</span></a>, the Forced Entertainment piece <a href="#note4"><span style="font-weight: bold;">[4]</span></a>, <a name="back4"></a>where the focus of the piece is diffused, so that everybody in the audience is getting a different experience of the piece. That interests me too.<br /><br />Or – and this is slightly more old hat – but I’m trying to think, and I can’t think what they were called... They were a French group, and it had the word ‘magic’ in it, and that’s useless... Jerome... something? <a href="#note5"><span style="font-weight: bold;">[5]</span></a> <a name="back5"></a>And he staged big theatrical spectacles at the Lyceum, and they were often in the audience – a little bit like Pina Bausch was, you know? So there would be things happening up the aisles and things happening in the balconies, and things happening on the stage. And you had a sense of – so where am I putting my attention? I’m... maybe it’s just ADD, but I liked that kind of approach more because I felt like, again, I was able to make choices about what I saw, what I watched, and I was able to get a different... Not that I was <span style="font-style: italic;">seeking</span> a differentiated experience from everybody else in the room, but that there was a sense that that was on offer, rather than that we were all being forced to witness the same thing.<br /><br />So those kinds of other things I find more interesting in terms of theatre because they somehow energise the making of what is the shared experience, and make that a more complex and I think [more] rewarding thing to grasp for, to reach out for. Whereas the smugness of: “I’m going to see <span style="font-style: italic;">As You Like It</span>, are they going to do it a la <span style="font-style: italic;">Alice in Wonderland</span>, or are they going to do it set in Benin in the eighteenth century?” You know, I mean it’s like, that’s about all there is interesting about it, and then people just have their <span style="font-style: italic;">As You Like It</span> experience and walk out and go to the pub, and there’s no sense of something having been <span style="font-style: italic;">made</span>. There’s something to do with the audience experience that I think is really important for me too. So anyway...<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">That’s useful. So it’s kind of... I suppose in a way then, more even than it’s about liveness and the signs of liveness, it’s a thing about stability: it’s about being presented with something that is or isn’t stable. When the idea is that everything in the piece is pre-resolved and all you have to do is have the patience to witness it; versus a situation where something is open – or everything is open.</span><br /><br />Yeah, yeah. I mean I used to have the same problem going to see a Steve Reich concert. I remember – I think I saw <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ly_s5yz1F_I"><span style="font-style: italic;">Drumming</span></a>, and two thirds of the way... – and I remember having had conversations with several people at the time and they were agreeing with me – I just wanted – <span style="font-style: italic;">now</span>, I wouldn’t, but at the time – I wanted somebody to get up drunk from the audience and stand on the stage and join in and for the rhythm to just go all to pot. Just for a moment, could we have a kind of a crack in the edifice of perfection that’s being offered up here?<br /><br />But, no, you’re talking about hybridity. Well... what about it?<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">So I suppose there’s an interesting paradox for me because my principal focus is theatre.</span><br /><br />Mm-hmm.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">In that theatre’s such a – for want of a better word – such a mongrel art.</span><br /><br />It is, yeah.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">It will just pull on anything that it can find, and that’s one of the things that I most value about it. But at the same time I feel very suspicious about people saying – it’s not necessarily just the thing about ‘theatre should be more like cinema’ or... Actually, usually it’s an economic argument, come to think of it. It’s usually about: theatre should be more like something that’s more popular at the moment than theatre is.</span><br /><br />Right.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Theatre should be more like going to a club. Or it should be more like...</span><br /><br />A concert.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Or a hypertextual experience, or, you know... So maybe it’s that, it’s just about where the will to hybridtiy comes from, and when it’s asking formal questions or aesthetic questions, or when it’s about a kind of emptily resonant innovation, that’s about keeping people’s attention in a “crowded cultural marketplace”.</span><br /><br />Interesting.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">But those two things kind of point in the same direction quite often, don’t they?</span><br /><br />Yeah, they do. So now you’ve got me worried!<br /><br />See, now, you’re coming at it from a point of view of somebody, as you say, who feels that their base frame is theatre. And I still end up coming at everything as somebody whose base frame is in poetry. And so then I start saying things like: OK, poetry always has been a... – I don’t know what the term’s going to be now, I’m going to say something stupid like multimedia or mixed media or interdisciplinary art form.<br /><br />And I’m going to give examples of Greek epic. We don’t really know because none of us was there, but it seems like there’s a fairly consistent sense that Greek epic was delivered in a pretty complicated way. There would be the person who’s got the text as their job. And given the nature of Greek epic it could well be that there was a bunch of people who were on shifts with the text as their job. And there was probably a chorus, at least at times, who would maybe be echoing certain of the phrases, or there might be some kind of unison recitation. There would be a mixture of singing and speaking. Sometimes it might go completely over into song: there would be the person who was playing the lyre, who might be the same person as the person who’s talking – so then we’ve kind of got, you know: welcome Bob Dylan! And then there would be the rhythmic movements of the people that you’re looking at: even if they’re just standing there with their various tics there’d still be rhythmic movement, but you have the rhythms of the involuntary movements that come from speaking, and particularly public speaking; but we also, by all accounts, have people whose job might have been to amplify certain aspects of the texts through their movements. And then you know that they built buildings, that were amphitheatres designed as acoustic environments to amplify the human voice. And this for a poem!<br /><br />Now of course you could say: that’s theatre! And I’d say it’s a fair cop, guv. And I’m not really interested in that as a model, I’m not interested in replicating that kind of thing at all. But I <span style="font-style: italic;">am</span> interested in the places where poetry talks in intimate ways with other art forms. Song being one of them. Um... I think embodied physical performance and the histories of performance art and the, you know, the business of putting somebody under a microscope on a stage... I mean, <a href="http://briancatling.com/Site/INTRO.html">Brian Catling</a> always used to laugh with me about it, he’d say, you know: What you’re really about is kind of trying to point out to us how trapped the performer is! ...Yeah, that’s... I feel more comfortable with that than I do being trapped as the audience.<br /><br />So, yeah, if we’re talking about the hybrid overlaps between poetry and other art forms, I am interested in the fact – and this is what I’ve been doing quite a lot over the last few years – that... Basically, I project things that I read. But I don’t project texts; I project things that might include textual elements. They’re not really... They’re <span style="font-style: italic;">kind of</span> movies, but they’re actually often made up of static images that just move through each other... So I read them live. And then I’m <span style="font-style: italic;">in</span> those projections, too. I don’t stand to the side and say, Oh look at that, you can see that... So, they’re projected <span style="font-style: italic;">on me</span>. And so then my physical presence obscures and erases some things that I might be trying to read, and also things that the audience might be trying to see. But then they can see things on me that I can’t see. So that, for me, in my own kind of weird logic, moves the authority position in the sense that you normally have with an author: which is that they can see a lot of what’s happening compared to the audience, they can see the whole text. I can’t. I become part of a text as I’m also trying to give voice to it and talk about it. And then I can be facing it and I can be facing away from it and commenting on it. And then I get off into using a lot of things which are theatrical devices: asides, footnotes, interludes...<br /><br />And it’s totally improvised. ...<span style="font-style: italic;">Almost</span>. Except that I’ve always got pieces of paper in my hand. Because I like that link to the sense of the live poetry reading. And because the pieces of paper in my hand act as another screen which catch other details, very beautifully I think, and sometimes I play with that.<br /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/NyGniEFuXCk?rel=0" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="390" width="480"></iframe><br /><br /><span>cris cheek at Sound Poetry Explosion, Northwest Film Forum, Seattle, WA, 11 February 2010</span><br /></span></div><br /><br />So there’s an example of a hybrid which is not trying to make a poem more like a film, but is certainly trying to make the experience of... let’s say engaging with a poet trying to chase down moments of grappling with the processes of the production, of producing a poem and circulating it in a kind of a micro/macro set of interrelationships, as live and as decentred as I can – at the moment... I know I could go a lot further with it. I really love the idea that the audience is writing stuff and I’m trying to grab it. Maybe that too. I’ve talked with <a href="http://programmatology.shadoof.net/">John Cayley</a> about the idea of having sort of, like, a hundred keyboards and, you know, then people could be writing anything, and I would be attempting to read it... But that’s... Yeah, there aren’t that many venues that are set up that way.<br /><br />So I like something that’s a little bit low-tech, that’s kind of simple, but that’s got some... It allows people not to feel utterly like they have to fetishize looking at me or listening to me, the author; there’s a sound/image interrelationship in terms of what <span style="font-style: italic;">they’re</span> reading and what they’re seeing me trying to interpret and produce meanings from. And that they are witnesses to the emergence of the poem, and that they’re contributing to that. Much in the way that I think I did at a particular period in time really love free improvised music: where sometimes I would feel that the audience pretty much made the music happen, because the musicians were so attentive to the possibility of everything that could occur that there was a... I don’t know, a commune. ...[I’m] interested in the word ‘commune’.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Did you ever collaborate with musicians in that sort of context?</span><br /><br />Yeah. Yeah, a lot.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">It’s something in your work that I don’t know much about.</span><br /><br />Yeah, I was at the <a href="http://www.variant.org.uk/8texts/Clive_Bell.html">LMC</a> <a href="#note6"><span style="font-weight: bold;">[6]</span></a>,<a name="back6"></a> ’76, ’77, ’78...<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Oh I know you were around, yeah...</span><br /><br />Yeah I worked with <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2007/mar/05/guardianobituaries.obituaries">Paul Burwell</a>, and <a href="http://www.sylviahallett.co.uk/">Sylvia Hallett</a> and <a href="http://www.clivebell.co.uk/">Clive Bell</a> and that lot. And sometimes we had, you know, street bands together so I used to just play with them.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">But..., so you’re playing as a musician...</span><br /><br />Playing as a musician. And then sometimes I was, er... Talking, live.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Yeah. And that was, I guess, at around the same time that you were quite heavily involved in dance stuff as well.</span><br /><br />Yeah, I was talking with dancers too. I improvised talks for <a href="http://www.michaelclarkcompany.com/">Michael Clark</a>, and <a href="http://www.mirandatufnell.co.uk/">Miranda Tufnell</a> and Dennis Greenwood. That was actually my favourite experience, I think, that, and we went on quite a big tour... They worked out a bunch of... Well, we rehearsed for about three or four weeks, worked every day all day, and I was hired to be the composer. But actually I produced a bunch of texts. And so I had a whole mishmash of texts. Every day I’d record – I’d have a tape recorder there and I’d record what I was saying, and they’d be moving around and I’d do some more recording, and then I’d go home and I’d transcribe that, and then I’d go back in the following day and I’d try some of that out, and we’d try it with different movement materials, and we were changing lights to change spaces in relation to the body and the floor, kind of sizes of rooms... It was called <span style="font-style: italic;">Night Pieces</span>. And we ended up with... I had reams and reams of text and they had lots of movement material, and then basically what we’d do would be to go out on stage and play the material in completely different combinations and completely different orders every night. So it was a kind of improvised talk/movement piece that was about an hour long.<br /><br />And then I got the point where I would kind of rehearse the <span style="font-style: italic;">feel</span> of the talking, so I’d then just be sat on the stage, with my back to the audience, just talking. I mean, I’ve got the text, I find it pretty interesting, I’ve just never been clear how to publish it, because I liked the recombinant nature of it, and I don’t particularly want to produce a text that repeats and recombines – there’s so much of that around anyway. This was 1980, ’81.<br /><br />And I did some talk-based work with <a href="http://www.dance-tech.net/video/video/show?id=1462368%3AVideo%3A15448">Lisa Nelson</a>, the dancer with Steve Paxton; and with <a href="http://ciciblumstein.wordpress.com/2009/10/30/whatever-happened-to-british-new-dance-mary-prestidge-talk/">Mary Prestidge.</a> ...And I worked on a version of <a href="http://www.realitystreet.co.uk/allen-fisher.php">Allen Fisher’s <span style="font-style: italic;">Place</span></a> with <a href="http://www.theplace.org.uk/?lid=188">Sue MacLennan</a>.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Really?! Wow! I didn’t know that!</span><br /><br />Yeah. She did a solo version of Allen’s <span style="font-style: italic;">Place</span>! [laughs]<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Gosh! ...OK, that’s blown my mind! I had no idea about that.</span><br /><br />Um... And I did also some different talking performances with <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hyjs0LplIdY">Kirstie Simson</a>, who’s a contact improviser. And then these slightly more set pieces with Michael Clark. — Yeah, the thing of talking being an instrument. Very interesting.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Mmm. And so... I mean, you’re a trained musician, yeah? Kind of...?</span><br /><br />Er... Yeah, I studied... I learned how to put the right end of the clarinet in my mouth, and take a few grades, and that kind of thing.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Yeah.</span><br /><br />Played drums, played guitar, bass...<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">So... that’s part of your compositional sense? A kind of...</span><br /><br />Yeah.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">That would be a route into text?</span><br /><br />Yeah.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">And that came first? Or was happening in parallel...? Or everything was converging...?</span><br /><br />Um... No, they all happened pretty much at the same time. The same time as I was hearing and experiencing the sound poetry world... The <a href="http://www.fylkingen.se/node/259">Fylkingen festivals</a>, and the sound poetry festival in Amsterdam, and in Toronto, and the <span style="font-style: italic;">jgjgjgjgjg...</span> stuff <a href="#note7"><span style="font-weight: bold;">[7] </span></a><a name="back7"></a>with <a href="http://www.lawrenceupton.org/reviews/matPWII.html">Lawrence Upton</a> and <a href="http://www.fencott.com/Clive/index.html">P.C. Fencott</a>, and then we also had <a href="http://www.billygriff.sathosting.net/">Bill Griffiths</a> who would join us sometimes, and...<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">And Jeremy...</span><br /><br />...Jeremy Adler would join us sometimes. And sometimes there was also the electroacoustic thing happening... There would be a real interest in what you can do with tape manipulation... Sometimes there was a: Oh fuck it, do we really have to program these parameters into this Buchla synthesizer and wait twenty minutes for a sound to come out?! Why don’t we just do it with our voices? There’s that kind of, you know... I think ‘paleotechnic’ was the word that [Steve] McCaffery used... So sometimes there was that.<br /><br />And, yeah, these were all happening kind of within a period of probably five or six years.<br /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-2ThOsg6D-o4/Tj1wn_VOD_I/AAAAAAAACtk/S7uMdbZUQDk/s1600/bobincanada.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 234px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-2ThOsg6D-o4/Tj1wn_VOD_I/AAAAAAAACtk/S7uMdbZUQDk/s320/bobincanada.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5637786140855373810" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:85%;">Not quite <span style="font-style: italic;">jgjgjgjgjg...</span> but not far off:<br />L to R: cris cheek, Bob Cobbing, Bill Griffiths, Jeremy Adler; Canada, 1977?<br />Photo: Steven Ross Smith<br /></span></div><br /><br />There was also [work] with <a href="http://vimeo.com/476620">Philip Jeck</a>... Phil and I used to sit for hours and hours and hours and hours at his house and my house just with turntables and Dansettes and cassette recorders and I think reel-to-reel recorders, and just push sound around, get records stuck in grooves and play with little sound fragments and little voice fragments in the grooves and so forth. All of that kind of stuff.<br /><br />And then playing as a... Not as hardcore and attuned an improviser as some of the people from the LMC that I really admired – I mean many of the people from the LMC at that point, I really loved what they were doing. But I would play with them, you know, <a href="http://www.eyelessingaza.com/mbinteastley.html">Max Eastley</a> and Paul [Burwell] and a little bit with <a href="http://www.ccutler.com/ccutler/">Chris Cutler</a>... And Steve Cripps, a really incredible guy – have you heard of <a href="http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/%7Egiraffe/e/hard/text/cripps.html">Steve Cripps</a>?<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">No, that’s a name I don’t know.</span><br /><br />He was a pyrotechnic sculptor who did some of the more beautiful pieces of that period of time. He would do solos with a clarinet in one hand and a blowtorch in the other. [laughs] So you’d get... the blowtorch would go on, or an arclight or something, and he’d be drawing in the air with this torch, it would leave incredible light drawings in the air, and he would play in the dark. And then the blowtorch would go off, and then there’d be this incredible screeching on the clarinet, and then the blowtorch would come back on. Really lovely, er, very hybrid ideas about performance: sound/visual; sound/physical... You know, simple stuff: light on / light off; noise / light / noise / light... or whatever. Just [a] very... <span style="font-style: italic;">material</span> sense of working time. That <span style="font-style: italic;">Circadian Rhythm</span> piece that they produced at the LMC that David Toop set up... <a href="#note8"><span style="font-weight: bold;">[8] </span></a><a name="back8"></a>Yeah, and seeing people like <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjmjOZGuMQQ">Derek [Bailey] and Evan Parker</a> and people play regularly was extraordinary. I mean deeply influential.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Yeah.</span><br /><br />There’s something about time, and something very important about improvisation... And one of the things that would happen... – I’m just rabbiting a lot now!—<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">No, this is good!</span><br /><br />—One of the things that would happen, for example, in poetry readings of the period – I’m thinking about <a href="http://www.praguemicrofestival.com/en/authors/adair">Gilbert Adair</a>’s Sub Voicive series <a href="#note9"><span style="font-weight: bold;">[9] </span></a><a name="back9"></a>when it first started in Crouch End or something like that, I can’t remember the name of the café that we used to meet in – people would read for an hour and a half! Sometimes they’d do two one-hour sets – you know, one person would do two one-hour sets with a fifteen minute interval.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Wow!</span><br /><br />Um... And it would pretty much be a similar audience. And lots of <span style="font-style: italic;">guys</span> – but, hey, that was the nature of the scene at that time, and it’s a very difficult thing to explain away or... You know, there’s nothing you can do about it, it just <span style="font-style: italic;">was</span>. <a href="#note10"><span style="font-weight: bold;">[10] </span></a><a name="back10"></a>But you’d be sat there in a room and you’d be reading to Allen Fisher and Eric Mottram and Pierre Joris and Bill Griffiths and Bob Cobbing and Lawrence Upton or whatever, and maybe every now and again there’d be a Maggie [O’ Sullivan], or there’d be a Maggie and a Geraldine [Monk], or there’d be a Paige Mitchell or a Virginia Firnberg or somebody like that in the mix. But – incredible, that you’d read for an hour and then stop and then read for another hour!<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Yeah! How amazing!</span><br /><br />So people were really trying their work out. They were reading, kind of, you know, the notes they’d written on the bus on the way there. Not [like] now, when it’s five minutes or maybe fifteen.<br /><br />So I was writing long things. You’re writing things that sort of explored... going on a bit! Rightly or wrongly, but a lot of people were doing that. And it’s a very different sensibility, if you’re thinking about stretching lyric out over a protracted period of time, and watching how these things moved. And they moved much more – in my experience – much more like a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocNsHpG5T10">Steve Lacy</a> saxophone solo. Some introductory moves; a lot of space; then maybe some, you know... the duck whirling in the sky or something, bleeping and blurting and farting and flapping and... You know, a real kind of musical sense of composition. Different moods and different shifts.<br /><br />I think we felt that. I don’t know that anybody else could even get that from the texts now. If you looked at the texts could you really see that that was there? I don’t know. I would like to think that over time you could.<br /><br />Or people composing things in little sections, like Bill Griffiths’s <a href="http://www.pierrejoris.com/blog/?p=430"><span style="font-style: italic;">Cycles</span></a> and so forth. You know, really dense, like John Zorn blowing his duck whistles into a bucket of water. [laughs] And you get that for four minutes and then he stops and stands up and, you know, somebody comes on and starts to bash a gong for ten minutes, and then that stops and then someone comes on and whirls a firework; and then <a href="http://www.luxonline.org.uk/artists/annabel_nicolson/index.html">Annabel Nicolson</a>’s there and she’s got fireflies in a small cage. And all the lights are out and you just see the fireflies lighting up and going dark. And then, you know, Paul Burwell throws a firework at his drumset or something. I mean I’m being silly, but... very interesting explosive sensibilities. Not explosive. Well actually in some ways, yes, explosive. Explosive doesn’t have to be big, it can be little... [voices some little explosions]<br /><br />And then one other thing to say about this in terms of the influence, I think, in terms of hybridity, were – in that period of time, too, ’78, ’79 I’m thinking – at the <a href="http://www.acme.org.uk/history.php">Acme Gallery</a> in Covent Garden.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Mmm.</span><br /><br />Which was an incredible place. Which had some of the most astonishing sculptural / durational / performative works going on in it. I’m thinking of pieces like <a href="http://www.artcornwall.org/features/Kerry_Trengove_by_Rose_Garrard.htm">Kerry Trengove</a>’s <span style="font-style: italic;">Passage </span><span style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="#note11"><span style="font-weight: bold;">[11]</span></a></span>, <a name="back11"></a>where he dug his way out of the gallery. He dug down through the floor of the gallery and out across the road, under the road, outside the gallery, and popped up in Covent Garden gardens (as was at that point). Or Stuart Brisley. Stuart took the roof of the gallery, and built a staircase up one more flight. <a href="#note12"><span style="font-weight: bold;">[12] </span></a><a name="back12"></a>Or Steve Cripps again, who made machines that would literally be digging holes in the gallery walls.<br /><br />There would be regular – <span style="font-style: italic;">fairly</span> regular; I may be thinking more regular than they [actually] were, but let’s say once a month or so – evenings at the Acme Gallery where you’d have filmmakers, choreographers, improv musicians, maybe sound artists, maybe sound sculptors, er, maybe a poet... Like, you know, <a href="http://www.dmu.ac.uk/faculties/humanities/cepa/visiting-practitioners/2008-09/cepa-visiting-practitioners-rose-english.jsp">Rose English</a> would do a brief monologue; <a href="http://www.sallypotter.com/">Sally Potter</a> would show a film; <a href="http://www.rosemarybutcher.com/">Rosemary Butcher</a> would show a new bit of choreography; and Paul Burwell and David Toop would play a duet; and maybe a poet would read a bit – Jackson Mac Low would perform a <a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Mac-Low.php">Vocabulary Gatha</a> or something like that. That would be an evening. Astonishing!<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Yeah!</span><br /><br />And so the film audience and the music audience and the poetry audience and the dance audience would all be there. And they’d all be experiencing each other’s stuff. And then suddenly within the space of about three or four years—<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Yeah...</span><br /><br />—it had just all gone off into separate...—<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">And what were the forces behind that? Because, you know, I don’t... Ah, well, it looks like you don’t understand either!</span><br /><br />[laughs] No, I really don’t. I mean, yes... So this is something that I’m trying to write a book about. Not <span style="font-style: italic;">that</span> aspect of the moment, but actually the... The Film-Makers’ Collective <a href="#note13"><span style="font-weight: bold;">[13]</span></a>, <a name="back13"></a>the [London] Musicians’ Collective, the <a href="http://www.chisenhaledancespace.co.uk/about/history">X6 Dance Collective</a>, the Four Corners photo collective, Camerawork... and the different magazines that they each had, Readings and Musics and New Dance and so forth, I mean... So I can’t give you an exact date on this, but I’m thinking ’81, ’82, ’83, where, for example, we’d moved past the initial stages at Chisenhale [Dance Space], which was from X6. So there’s an example of how things began to move.<br /><br />X6 was in <a href="http://bak.spc.org/everything/e/hard/text/medalla.html">Butler’s Wharf</a>. And there used to be fantastic parties down there at Butler’s Wharf, where you’d have <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UGZ0NS_U4k">Siouxsie and the Banshees</a> playing and free musicians playing and fire sculptures all happening in the same kinds of spaces. The landlords thought: Actually these are pretty interesting buildings, why don’t we move in and turn them into some luxury apartments? So that’s one of the things that happened, is that the venues got put under pressure. Acme Gallery closed, they moved.<br /><br />Another thing that happened was that arts funding began to change in its tactics. For example, there never used to be a dance department at the Arts Council. It came under theatre, I think. But there was a sufficient lobby from within the Arts Council to create a dance department. So then you suddenly begin to get these things hived off into separate art forms. And the nature of funding (as I’m sure you’re all too horribly aware), at least at times, is to be somewhat protective about how its money is being apportioned. So the dance department would be interested in putting money into dancers and choreographers and dance events; they weren’t particularly interested in having dance events mixed up with other art forms. They wanted to develop and build a dance audience, and develop and build the dance critics for the papers, and, you know, if a dance critic is coming along and they’re having to put up with a fire sculptor who could just come in and set fire to a three-piece suite and everybody would have to evacuate the building and then the fire brigade would come and then you couldn’t even begin to get back in for the last performance which was the thing they’d come to review...! You know, I mean you can see how that stuff started to happen. Just a little bit. Something to do with spaces changing, something to do with – dare I say it? – the shift from the utter ballsed-up ineptitude and corruption of the old Labour muck-up in the end of the 70s, and then the Lady with her new ideas. I’m not saying that one is better and one is worse, I’m just saying that one made the space possible for the other. Although in fact, you know, the ballsed-up corrupt Labour London enabled the splendour and the fury of punk and post-punk and so...<br /><br />But something to do with the shift in politics, changing regimes, changing pressures within arts funding criteria, and... Maybe things just have their moment.<br /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-KMmldVo2b98/Tj1woW1XaXI/AAAAAAAACt8/uGtzba5-JWg/s1600/cris.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 238px; height: 320px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-KMmldVo2b98/Tj1woW1XaXI/AAAAAAAACt8/uGtzba5-JWg/s320/cris.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5637786147164219762" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:85%;">mr cheek having a moment<br /></span></div><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Mm. Yeah. But what this does sort of reframe really interestingly for me is something I think I sort of became aware of as I was first getting to know you, which was a real dissatisfaction with certain of the conventions around poetry readings. And I suppose the kind of meagreness of some of those events, and the expectations around them, expectations around the dialogue that might or might not come out of them.</span><br /><br />Yeah, I was very abject! [laughs]<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">You made a couple of quite prominent interventions, ten or twelve years ago, about this as a question. And when you came to CPT the first time, which I think must have been about 2003, something like that, to do – was it a Sub Voicive? Did Lawrence [Upton] invite you to do a Sub Voicive?</span><br /><br />Yeah, there was a Total Writing <a href="#note14"><span style="font-weight: bold;">[14] </span></a><a name="back14"></a>and then there was a Sub Voicive.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Yeah, I remember you doing quite a big kind of solo...</span><br /><br />Like four hours!<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">No, but you were quite reluctant, I think, to do it—</span><br /><br />I was. I was.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">—and quite anxious about it in some ways.</span><br /><br />I was. That was [the] one when I wrote to a number of people – you were one of them – and asked you for material—<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Yeah...</span><br /><br />—and said: Send me stuff and I’ll make it part of it. And I did. But yes. Yeah, I’d got really hacked off with it all. [laughs]<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">And did you work through that? Or is that still...</span><br /><br />[big sigh] Well it’s complicated.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Okay.</span><br /><br />I’m happy to talk about aspects of the complications. Um... All right.<br /><br />A number of things came together. One was that... I had got a bit... I mean, CPT was one of the bright stars in the firmament for me, in the sense that finally someone was making it possible – and indeed in some ways invoking the necessity – for poetry to begin to rethink itself out of the ‘upstairs [at the] pub’ reading mode. Sometimes that [mode] can be great, but it just didn’t particularly do it for me, and I felt that poetry in terms of its audience and in terms of its... I don’t mean numbers, but I mean... There was a lot of conversation about the fact that upstairs rooms in pubs, particularly at that time, weren’t the places that women would rather go to, shall we say. Or weren’t necessarily the kinds of places that people who weren’t of a straight male gender orientation would rather go to. Especially if it’s, you know, a room that nobody else wants to use, that they’re very happy to hire out to the poets because nobody else wants to rent it. Kind of, you know, chintz wallpaper and pictures of Churchill on the wall, or whatever, Battle of Trafalgar or something. That can be funny, and in some ways there are moments at which I’ve wanted to make a very pointed piece and call it ‘The Poetry Reading’ and do all of these clichés.<br /><br />So that was one aspect of it. And then another aspect of it was that, um, I got frustrated about the fact that it felt more and more difficult to do some of the things – and it still does – that I wanted to do technologically within the poetry context. I didn’t want to do anything really <span style="font-style: italic;">dramatic</span>. I just wanted to be able to do something <span style="font-style: italic;">a bit</span>. Like I wanted to maybe do something with sound, but maybe there wasn’t a mic. Or you had to carry it there yourself. Plus I’d moved out of London and it was getting more and more difficult to carry everything around.<br /><br />Even those aren’t really the key things. One of the most critical things was that I’d finished – I have to be careful how I say all of this stuff... The work that I’d been doing, that I’d been really enjoying, about the interface between poetry and song, and gesture and calligraphic marking, and breath and instrument, and composition and improvisation in and around the text, with <a href="http://www.sianed.co.uk/">Sianed Jones</a>, ...didn’t quite come to an end, it just went into a segue for me. And I got very engaged with ideas about – what shall I call it? More participatory forms of making work.<br /><br />And I also felt a little bit – although I don’t think anybody else would agree with me – that I’d got to the point where I thought I could kind of do it. And so I got bored with the fact that I thought I could kind of do it. And I wanted to either take a rest or a back seat, or stop for a while, until I felt that I could challenge myself again. I didn’t want to get bored with my own repetitions, or my own schticks. Even though I still have them, of course.<br /><br />So the work that I started doing – and it came out of <a href="http://www.massobs.org.uk/index.htm">mass observation</a>, and a genuine interest in what mass observation had tried to get going, but also the real problems in what mass observation was up to – led me to do this little piece for their sixtieth anniversary, which was – you probably don’t remember... – It was called ‘Mayday’ and I tried to get as many people as I possibly could... – it was a bit short notice – it was early days of the internet. Relatively early days of the internet – I mean, if you think that I was online at the end of ’94, and there wasn’t really a browser even at that point – then we got into kind of <a href="http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2010/04/0422mosaic-web-browser/">Mosaic</a> and then we got to Netscape... It was the early days of e-lists, I think British Poetry <a href="#note15"><span style="font-weight: bold;">[15] </span></a><a name="back15"></a>had just started in ’96, and was one of the things that encouraged me to do this. And so I did this homage to mass observation where I wrote to a bunch of people – hard copy and sent some stuff out to lists – and said, look I’m doing this thing, I want to investigate a little bit more what mass observation was up to, and I’m going to use the election of May 1st 1997 to do that – this was the Tony Blair... um... what do they call it? Not seascape... Wasn’t seasick, although it kind of was... Um... Sea-change! [laughs]<br /><br />So I got interested in that work and that’s how I started working with <a href="http://www.kirstenlavers.net/">Kirsten [Lavers]</a>, because Kirsten was very taken by that project; and then the following year we did a revisitation of it, and we did it live on the web, and we did a 24-hour online performance, putting up <a href="http://www.varchive.org.uk/var/mayday/about.html">this web site – and it’s still up</a>, and it’s an interesting piece, I think, a very early, very clunky hypertext piece. But there’s a lot of work there. And a lot of poets and a lot of visual artists and a lot of ordinary people and friends and relatives and all kinds of things were involved in that project.<br /><br />So I got bitten – and it wasn’t the first time, because I’d done a lot of work in the community arts movement in the mid-1980s, which I’m sure you don’t know about either, down in Salisbury, for Mobile Arts <a href="#note16"><span style="font-weight: bold;">[16] </span></a><a name="back16"></a>and with the Friends and Allies conference. A lot of – for me – very interesting work with oral history and reminiscence and photo-text projects and stuff.<br /><br />Anyway, so, yes, the idea had shifted away from me – me the poet-creator who’s got something to say – to thinking that I wanted to... not orchestrate other people’s things, but set up frames within which a diversity of points of view could be seen. Kind of that simple, really. And I was very interested in inclusivity, very interested in non-censorship, very interested in rupturing across generations, age groups, cultural perspectives, all that kind of thing. And that’s what really became the nub of the <a href="http://www.radiotaxi.org.uk/tnwk/thingsnotworthkeeping/index.html">Things Not Worth Keeping</a> project. <span style="font-weight: bold;"></span>I mean although Kirsten and I made a lot of work as two artists, the idea was that it wasn’t <span style="font-style: italic;">me</span> who was coming up with everything any more. And that had been growing through the work with Sianed – you know, I was continually being mediated by / interrupted by / (quite delightfully) / messed with / being required to (literally sometimes) change up what I was doing in order for it to stay as interesting as the kinds of elements that she was bringing to it, and so forth. It was a very good conversation, but it made me realise that I wanted to have... another kind of form of collaboration. And not just that form of collaboration where you’re working closely with somebody else and you’re maybe each taking responsibility for your stuff or you’re co-creating something intensely together: but really opening out what the idea of collaboration was.<br /><br />So when I came to do that thing at Sub Voicive I was in a pretty abject relationship to the poetry world because I felt that when I came to do a poetry reading or I was asked to do a poetry reading I was put back in the position of: Oh here’s cris doing his poet bit. And I wanted to try to struggle with that.<br /><br />And that struggle stayed. Um... It’s gone again now.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Hm!</span><br /><br />Now that’s partly because that collaboration went to such a... I mean in some ways such a fulsome place, but also in some ways such a terrifying and messy place. And I’m happy to talk about all of that but... Let me just try and answer your question a little bit!<br /><br />So... Participation and community and diffraction of power and... Thinking more of being a creative curator... Allowing other people to speak. I wanted to make work that allowed other people to speak. So hence the Coleridge piece [TNWK's <span style="font-style: italic;">Rime of the Ancient Mariner</span>] which is, you know, I can’t remember, something like 425 different voices in the poem. Hence the <a href="http://www.radiotaxi.org.uk/tnwk/collection/index.html"><span style="font-style: italic;">Millennium Collection</span></a> and all of those ideas about value. And to a certain extent, even when Kirsten and I were making those (I think) very beautiful and detailed and complex weavings, the whole book-mania project [the pieces <span style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.radiotaxi.org.uk/tnwk/thingsnotworthkeeping/retro.html">Retrospective Scree(n)d</a> </span>and <a href="http://www.radiotaxi.org.uk/tnwk/thingsnotworthkeeping/index.html"><span style="font-style: italic;">The Books</span></a>], there was still a lot of porosity to it. When we were making those things the computer would be there and the books that were the residual recombinant books from the shredding of the 101 books, and all of that gubbins: they would be there and people could come in and they could type into the texts that were emerging. So even the writing that emerged wasn’t ours and it wasn’t mine and it wasn’t hers. And in fact I showed some of this in New York after that relationship ended, and it was kind of my way of trying to make contact with it and move on. Because I did this final showing in a gallery in New York and an old friend of mine – Marshall Reese from Co-Accident <a href="#note17"><span style="font-weight: bold;">[17]</span></a>; <a name="back17"></a>I’d done some work with Co-Accident in Baltimore a long while ago – asked me to go and give a reading. And I read this thing and afterwards he said to me, Well you know I really liked the sound stuff you were doing, and these other texts you were reading, but I didn’t like <span style="font-style: italic;">that</span> piece. And I said: Well why didn’t you like it? He said: Well I think the writing’s bad! And it really kind of cut in all sorts of ways, because I thought: Yeah, <span style="font-style: italic;">I know what you mean</span>... And it’s not mine! But that’s the point.<br /><br />And so, you know, all of those different veils were falling away and being plastered up to my head and falling away at the same time. Because I’m very fascinated by that, the edge, the problematic edge of control and failure in relation to work that involves a large number of contributors. And I’m totally committed politically to inclusiveness, but it really has its painful side! In fact I had a conversation with John Wilkinson in Paris <a href="#note18"><span style="font-weight: bold;">[18]</span></a>, <a name="back18"></a>where I was saying to John, you know: John you have to consider the possibility of talking to Sarah Palin. And he got really angry, and said: No! She wants to do harm to me! And I said, well, maybe she thinks you want to do harm to her. Maybe you need to have a conversation.<br /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-nAQyW-oZeBo/Tj102O0lLAI/AAAAAAAACuM/67_iIZMUwuw/s1600/m_web.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 206px; height: 320px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-nAQyW-oZeBo/Tj102O0lLAI/AAAAAAAACuM/67_iIZMUwuw/s320/m_web.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5637790783578123266" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:85%;">Meet the author: in media res for <span style="font-style: italic;">the church - the school - the beer</span> (<span style="font-style: italic;">Plantarchy </span>3, 2007)<br />Photo: Sianed Jones<br /></span></div><br /><br />So, yes, that’s the crazy edge. It does get like that very quickly, I know, setting frames that try to be inclusive – that’s fascinating – and of course they never are, because you’re always excluding by the nature of the grounds that you’re choosing to operate on [in] the first place, and the language that you use to describe it. I mean you know this, you do that kind of stuff, that’s where we started this conversation. [. . .] It’s a hugely demanding line to be on, because you always have this struggle with yourself and your own preferences and [what] you’re expecting to happen or what you’re hoping other people are going to get out of it. In fact [it’s] everything good and bad about a relationship, all put under an intense microscope, with people you don’t know.<br /><br />So the fascination for me, somehow... [or] the <span style="font-style: italic;">allure</span> at least – although I think I’m playing with the allure at the moment rather than fully grasping it, and I might be trying to seduce potential collaborators in the enterprise – is to try to look at ways of writing what I think of as a social poem. I want to try and get it to the point where it’s porous enough and open enough that people want to be part of it. Now why on earth would they want to be part of it if there isn’t something interesting there? And so, you know, sometimes I feel like a snake oil salesman, and then at other times I feel that there’s a willingness to begin to try to discuss more openly than I’ve felt for a long while. Because there is more uncertainty around than there has been for such a long while, and I feel the arts overlapping in terms of some of their philosophical / aesthetic / social / conceptual ambitions, more than I have for a while. So I’m optimistic that that can happen. And I like the idea that poetry once again can find a way of being part of that conversation.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">So is that the impulse behind what we’re doing tomorrow [at the Birkbeck event], partly?</span><br /><br />No. [laughs]<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Something completely else! Well maybe </span>you<span style="font-style: italic;"> should tell </span>me<span style="font-style: italic;">, but it’s interesting to me that you’ve been doing kind of polyvocal stuff longer than you’ve been in print, for example...?</span><br /><br />Yes.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">So I’m wondering what the impulse is in right now wanting to visit that with some people and talk about it again and reinstigate that.</span><br /><br />Yeah, I wondered what that work was. [. . .] I started thinking a couple of years ago about why it seemed that that was a particular moment when there was lots of that kind of thing going on. ...And then of course as soon as I said it, I realised particularly that when I say that kind of thing, everyone goes hang on what do you mean?, you don’t mean this, and you don’t mean that... and then I start thinking, OK, forget it, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said anything in the first place. Because of course there are still things like that going on.<br /><br />And maybe it was my own experience, but I do have a sense that there was a certain, utterly utopian moment being reached for, in terms of thinking that one could produce texts – that could be performed by many many people – that were poems. Beyond that model of the Greek chorus – although it could just be unison, although unison’s incredibly difficult, and actually mostly boring and stilted.<br /><br />I was just thinking, OK, so, is the poem – let’s say more generally – is the poem – OK, you’re going to say theatre, I know! – is it a place where... (I was thinking about it in terms of poetry because it’s not the way that people normally think about poetry.) ...Is the poem a place where some form of community is being modelled? Albeit utterly provisional. Maybe just in the moment of one reader reading that thing in a book, you know, under their pillow with a torch. Is there a provisional moment of community there?<br /><br />And so I just was interested in that question, and I thought, OK, well if it could be staged as a question – it’s not normally how people think about the experience of poetry, particularly if we’re looking at polyvocal poems, poems which were deliberately written to be performed by at least more than one voice, but I think it gets more interesting once you get beyond two, actually – is there some kind of instantiation of community there? And of course there’s an instantiation of community in the <span style="font-style: italic;">event</span> of that being witnessed by other people. Because you have that community of the witnesses; you have the community of them if you enlarge them out in terms of the effect of the observers on the observed – from anthropology you have that community of kind of witness-participants they become, in a way; and then you have the community of the people who are experiencing being the foregrounded community... (You get the stupidity of the complexity of these kinds of formulations!) And then the whole event.<br /><br />And I was thinking, OK, so lots of people I know, in all sorts of different walks of life, and [of] all sorts of different political persuasions, are talking about group formation, community formation, ideas about neighbourhoods – but particularly about what community <span style="font-style: italic;">is</span>. Because it’s been such a nebulously used word, really. “I’m going back to my community.” “I live in a community.”<br /><br />And so I was interested in revisiting those texts – both looking at them and talking about them, and doing them, and also thinking, particularly, is that dead? Was that a moment that was an utterly utopian moment that’s connected up to the liberatory politics of the 1960s, broadly speaking – dialectics of liberation and all that stuff; or, is it something that’s worth another go? And if it is worth another go, then maybe it does begin to become very much more connected with theatre. In which case I’d be very interested in theatre again!<br /><br />...And the sense that something gets carried from that, by word of mouth and reportage on the events, into other moments of community formation, and blogs and lists and other kinds of community, these mixed realities that we’re all living in; and then also that people would make works in response to that experience, and so forth. So I just wondered if there was something there. ...I have no idea, actually.<br /><br />And then I was also very interested in highly scripted things like <a href="http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/weiner/">Hannah Weiner</a>’s <span style="font-style: italic;">Clairvoyant Journal</span>. I mean it’s highly scripted and highly rehearsed. What kind of community is that? That poses a very awkward question, and a very interesting question in relation to theatre too, which is something that we were harping on earlier, which is that if the community that’s being modelled on the stage is highly scripted, highly controlled, highly rehearsed, then how does anybody else jump in and take part in it? Does it exclude by nature of all sorts of skill bases, for example – let alone anything else?<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Yeah. I mean this really makes me think about... There’s been something very weird for me in the past few years about trying to come into a less browbeaten relationship with the idea of being a director, the ‘rectitude’ of directing, and I think I feel more and more like what I do when I go to work, what my job is – and I like this because it feels like it’s applicable to a practice in poetry even though I think I go to poetry for quite different reasons than I go to theatre, it feels like there’s a plausible crossover here – it’s about creating spaces in which other acts of creativity can be hosted. So this past week for me [on </span><span>Open House</span><span style="font-style: italic;">] has been so much about creating the space that someone can enter into and not immediately feel unproductively disoriented by.</span><br /><br />Right. Good phrase!<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">So we had someone come in to join us, who stayed with us all week – came in on Monday morning and stayed, I thought rather against the odds, and she got more and more into it, and had expected to come through the doors and see a play being rehearsed, and that wasn’t what was going on. And there was something very heartening for me about the idea that although her expectations weren’t met when she came through the door, she found a way of being able to at least sit with what was happening, until she came to start recognizing what some parts of that were. So she wasn’t thrown through a loop by that, she could find a place to be in that space.</span><br /><br />So what was the quality of the linguistic content that she was experiencing?<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Well that’s interesting, isn’t it? I mean I think the place she was able to attach to was the conversational mode that was kind of threading through everything. And it was at its best when it was conversational rather than presentational. Really early on in the week we found ourselves trying to present our process in a way that would open it out to people. But actually that I think inadvertently sort of... We ratcheted up some sense of our ownership or our expertise or whatever, which was totally specious.</span><br /><br />“Trust us!”<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Yeah, yeah! Whereas actually I think the best moments were the ones where people were drawn in by conversation and stayed because they were interested to see where the conversation goed. ...Goed? Went! Would go. ...<a href="http://www.ontroerendgoed.be/projects.php">Goed?!</a></span><br /><br />G-O-A-D.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Nice. Thanks for recuperating that! [laughs] So... But the thing I was trying to get to with that was about the idea of the score, actually. Because one thing that was really helpful for us – and part of being able to make that very open, accessible space – was about there being a score that was helping to hold that space open: without which I think we would have struggled because we would have endlessly been looking for something to substitute for it.</span><br /><br />Right. So what’s the difference between a score and a frame?<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Yeah. ...So I suppose what I’m thinking about in this particular instance was a kind of a structure that everybody was able to understand. In the end it didn’t play actually a very formative role in what happened. It just...</span><br /><br />It was there.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">It had our backs!</span><br /><br />Yeah.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">And it meant that when it came to putting something together on Friday,it was there and we could use it in so far as it was useful and let it go in so far as it wasn’t. But knowing that it was there, it made the rest of the space more permissive.</span><br /><br />And by that time everybody was aware of what that was?<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Yeah.</span><br /><br />You see the reason why I asked about linguistic content is because one of the things that fascinates me about the proposal of the polylingual / polyvocal / provisional community is that if you talk about that... I mean I completely understand what you’re saying about the sense of the conversational. It seems like there’s lots of space for everybody to come in. But as soon as you start saying the P-word, the ‘poetry’ word, the sense that poetry tends to... well, everybody’s prejudices about poetry: that it uses exclusive language, or that the language is put under too much pressure there, that it’s no longer demotic speech, that it’s exorcised the curse of the vernacular or whatever you want to say about it... That somehow it feels more difficult to enter.<br /><br />There were times – just to take it back to the improv music scene... There were times in the improv music scene when I think pretty much anybody could enter, and bash something. And then there were clearly moments when not everybody could. So there’s something about the terms that one establishes. You’re talking about a structure – I’m just being playful really when I’m saying what’s the difference between a frame and a structure and a score or whatever, I think they’re all very interesting in terms of how they operate and they overlap... Yeah, there’s something about the idea of the aspirational dystopia – the insane utopian aspiration of the community that could be modelled on poesis, the poetic – that really fascinates me. Because it seems to be that it’s the opposite from Plato saying that poets are dangerous and don’t have a place in the Republic. It’s like saying: We <span style="font-style: italic;">are</span> the Republic, we’re going to make it out of poetry. ...Which of course is complete..., you know... It’s insanity! I <span style="font-style: italic;">think</span>. But it’s a kind of insanity that really intrigues me.<br /><br />And so, you know, I start to wonder about other places within theatre from that moment in time – broadly speaking. I mean I talked about the Living Theatre earlier. I guess you could go to a maybe more well-known British example, which would be <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aur-t-RtOJM"><span style="font-style: italic;">Marat-Sade</span></a>, or something like that: where as you get this eruption of multiple voices, it’s basically bedlam. Or Babel.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Mmm.</span><br /><br />So it’s a very profound enquiry for me at the nub of it, is to say: is it possible to do something with this? And for it not to appear immediately to be a bunch of blokes making weird noises, who need to be locked up? ...For example.<br /><br />[laughs]<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">I think that’s a good place to stop!</span><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/9YYF-qVoEQA?rel=0" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="390" width="480"></iframe><br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span>cris cheek at Writing for their Lives, University of Washington-Bothell, 1o February 2010</span></span><br /></div><span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /><br /></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Notes:</span><br /><br />Coco props to <a href="http://www.joemilutis.com/">Joe Milutis</a>, the uploader of the three YouTube clips with which this post is crucially enlivened.<br /><br /><a name="note1"><span style="font-weight: bold;">[1]</span></a> This is a reference to a transcribed discussion (which I haven't read) in Charles Bernstein's essay 'On Theatricality'; it's mentioned in Robert Hampson's excellent and invaluable piece <a href="http://www.pores.bbk.ac.uk/1/Robert%20Hampson,%20%27cris%20cheek%20in%20manhattan%27.htm">'cris cheek in Manhattan'</a>, which at points covers similar ground to some regions of the present conversation. Hampson's essay would be a good jump-to point for those seeking to deepen and/or extend their engagement with cris's work. <a href="#back1"><span style="font-weight: bold;">[^]</span></a><br /><br /><a name="note2"><span style="font-weight: bold;">[2]</span></a> In his influential critique of the poetry reading, 'Implicit' -- framed as an email to critic / poet / friend Keith Tuma, and collected in Tuma and David Kennedy's mostly useful <span style="font-style: italic;">Additional Apparitions: Poetry, Performance &amp; Site Specificity </span>(<span style="font-style: italic;">The Paper </span>/ The Cherry On The Top Press, 2002) -- cheek quotes approvingly from a 2001 paper given at a New Work Network conference at the Arnolfini, Bristol by James Yarker (referred to throughout, unhappily, as James Harker) of <a href="http://www.stanscafe.co.uk/">Stan's Cafe</a>. Yarker's excellent paper, 'Audiences as Collaborators', can be read <a href="http://www.stanscafe.co.uk/helpfulthings/audiencesascollaborators.html">here</a>. <a href="#back2"><span style="font-weight: bold;">[^]</span></a><br /><br /><a name="note3"><span style="font-weight: bold;">[3] </span></a><a href="http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/maclow/about/dlb.html#_themarryingmaidenaplayofchanges"><span style="font-style: italic;">The Marrying Maiden</span></a> was written in 1958-59 and performed by the <a href="http://www.livingtheatre.org/">Living Theatre</a> during 1960-61. <a href="#back3"><span style="font-weight: bold;">[^]</span></a><br /><br /><a name="note4"><span style="font-weight: bold;">[4]</span></a> Portions of the text of <span style="font-style: italic;">Speak Bitterness </span>were first published, alongside works by Fiona Templeton and Fiona Wright, in issue 1 of <span style="font-style: italic;">Language Alive</span>, edited by cheek and published via his own Sound and Language imprint. If my own copy of this publication hadn't vanished down the back of a cosmic sofa, I might venture to say more confidently here how much I preferred the presentation of the Forced Entertainment text in this version than in the later, cleaner rendition in <a href="http://www.timetchells.com/projects/publications/certain-fragments/"><span style="font-style: italic;">Certain Fragments</span></a>. And, come to think of it, where is my copy of issue 1 of the similarly sized <span style="font-style: italic;">The Fred</span> magazine? That was brilliant. Damn you, cosmic sofa. <a href="#back4"><span style="font-weight: bold;">[^]</span></a><br /><br /><a name="note5"><span style="font-weight: bold;">[5] </span></a>We concluded that this was the Grand Magic Circus, under the direction of <a href="http://www.jeromesavary.fr/">Jérome Savary</a>. cheek's approval of Savary eventually prompts a whoosh of <span style="font-style: italic;">esprit d'escalier (pour homme) </span>while I'm transcribing: I wish I'd thought to ask cris about his experience of working with one of my theatrical heroes, John Fox, on <a href="http://www.welfare-state.org/">Welfare State International</a>'s <span style="font-style: italic;">Raising of the Titanic </span>as part of LIFT in 1983. Possibly for cris this isn't even theatre, or anyway not what he hears when I say "theatre". These categorical divisions are infinitely self-reinforcing. <a href="#back5"><span style="font-weight: bold;">[^]</span></a><br /><br /><a name="note6"><span style="font-weight: bold;">[6] </span></a>The London Musicians' Collective started in 1975 and was still busily promoting concerts and other activities, including its often remarkable annual festival, when I arrived in London in 1997; at that time it was an invaluable entry-point and resource base, and I eagerly and gratefully became a member. In 2002, following an earlier pilot scheme, the LMC launched <a href="http://resonancefm.com/">Resonance FM</a>, the experimental radio station, which survived the demise of the LMC itself in 2009 after its funding was brutally and unsupportably cut in the notorious Arts Council bloodbath of the previous year. <a href="#back6"><span style="font-weight: bold;">[^]</span></a><br /><br /><a name="note7"><span style="font-weight: bold;">[7] </span></a><span style="font-style: italic;">jgjgjgjgjg... (as long as you can say it that's our name) </span>formed at the London Sound Poetry Festival in June 1976; reconvened the following spring at Battersea Arts Centre (!) and expired a year later at a gig at Kings College London; in the interim there had been a number of official performances in the UK and Europe, as well as "events of which no prior warning was given". A <span style="font-style: italic;">jgjgjgjgjg </span>book containing "recipe section, write ups of events, details of death poetry, sheep poetry and wood poetry . . . and . . . hints for further reading" sadly never emerged. These details are taken from Lawrence Upton's one-sheet "DOCUMENTING <span style="font-style: italic;">jgjgjgjgjgjgjgjg (as long as you can say it, that's our name)</span>", available as a <a href="http://www.lawrenceupton.org/data/jgjgjgjgjg.pdf">pdf from his web site</a>. This seems like a good moment to drop in a general note of acknowledgement regarding Lawrence's assiduous documentation, at his site, of so many of the important collaborative projects in which he's been involved; future historians of these lives and times will have much for which to thank him. <a href="#back7"><span style="font-weight: bold;">[^]</span></a><br /><br /><a name="note8"><span style="font-weight: bold;">[8] </span></a>Paul Lytton, David Toop, Max Eastley, Paul Burwell, Annabel Nicolson, Evan Parker, Hugh Davies, Paul Lovens: <a href="http://www.efi.group.shef.ac.uk/labels/incus/incus33.html"><span style="font-style: italic;">Circadian Rhythm </span>(Incus, 1980)</a> <a href="#back8"><span style="font-weight: bold;">[^]</span></a><br /><br /><a name="note9"><span style="font-weight: bold;">[9]</span></a> Sub Voicive Poetry was mostly a reading series (there were occasional pamphlets, too, and latterly a number of useful colloquia), begun in 1980 by Gilbert Adair, who ought not to be confused with <a href="http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth01J17L141612620203">the <span style="font-style: italic;">other </span>Gilbert Adair</a>. (The contemporaneous existence of two separate literary Gilbert Adairs has been cited on either side of the intelligent design controversy.) Ulli Freer curated the series from 1992 and Lawrence Upton from 1994. For a long while in the 80s and 90s it was probably the most significant sustained reading series in the UK for experimental poetries. In 2001 when I took over Camden People's Theatre, I invited Sub Voicive to relocate to the theatre, and the association continued throughout my tenure, though attendances tailed off quite markedly. The reasons for this are probably multiple but there was certainly a constituency for whom the theatre ambience would never be as congenial as the pub back-rooms to which the series had accustomed itself: on which topic, see cris's remarks later in this interview. The series was formally discontinued in 2005, though I still like to think of it, indulgently, as being somehow in hiatus. <a href="#back9"><span style="font-weight: bold;">[^]</span></a><br /><br /><a name="note10"><span style="font-weight: bold;">[10] </span></a>On "nothing you can do about it", we might respectfully disagree, perhaps, though equally I doubt cris would disagree with my disagreement. <a href="#back10"><span style="font-weight: bold;">[^]</span></a><br /><br /><a name="note11"><span style="font-weight: bold;">[11] </span></a>Actually 1977, to be annoyingly precise. <a href="http://www.artquest.org.uk/artlaw/copyright/copyright-before-1989/self-expression-and-the-law.htm">Here's a nice article</a> on Trengove's piece, coming from a perspective that might usefully moderate -- or better yet, complicate -- any emerging picture of a blithely anarchic utopia of an art-scene. <a href="#back11"><span style="font-weight: bold;">[^]</span></a><br /><br /><a name="note12"><span style="font-weight: bold;">[12] </span></a>I think this must have been: Stuart Brisley, <span style="font-style: italic;">Touching Class </span>(with Iain Robertson: Acme Gallery, 1981). If anyone knows better, please set me straight. <a href="#back12"><span style="font-weight: bold;">[^]</span></a><br /><br /><a name="note13"><span style="font-weight: bold;">[13] </span></a>The London Film-Makers' Co-Op (1966-99), which evolved into <a href="http://www.lux.org.uk/">LUX</a>. <a href="#back13"><span style="font-weight: bold;">[^]</span></a><br /><br /><a name="note14"><span style="font-weight: bold;">[14] </span></a>Total Writing London was my own attempt to use CPT to create a space in which experimental poetry could be programmed right up against free improvised music (and allied leftfield trades) and live art, in which a meaningful hospitality could be extended to artists working in the crossover areas between these disciplines, and the absurdly separate audiences for each could meet and encounter each other. Specifically there were two long-weekend events in 2003 (reviewed <a href="http://www.paristransatlantic.com/magazine/monthly2003/09sep_text.html">here</a>) and 2004; thereafter, I left CPT and that was that, though I think the second year anyway felt like a bit of a misfire and I wouldn't have tried again in the same format. But the first of the TWL events was probably the best thing I did during my tenure.<br /><br />Completists might like to know that cheek had in fact already presented work at CPT, with Things Not Worth Keeping, in March 2003, before both these events. It was a one-off mixed bill called <span style="font-style: italic;">Paper Cuts</span>, for which participants were invited to make work in response to that day's newspaper. TNWK presented the first in what was to become a series of beautiful text/projection actions, with marks made in oil on newspaper sheets acting as a projection screen; the title of this sequence of works was "we are taking these steps because words must mean what they say jack straw", and the documentary photograph they sent me (below) became the cover image of the programme for Total Writing London. The list of <span style="font-style: italic;">Paper Cuts </span>participants <a href="http://www.radiotaxi.org.uk/tnwk/taking1.html">as documented on the TNWK site</a> omits a couple of names, one of whom may be of particular interest to those whose minds are disposed towards boggling: yes, reader, I am (I shall confidently presume to suppose) the only person ever to present cris cheek on the same bill as Russell Brand. <a href="#back14"><span style="font-weight: bold;">[^]</span></a><br /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-we2UckKedYc/Tj1woduKO5I/AAAAAAAACt0/cPYf4BF0RVI/s1600/cpt.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-we2UckKedYc/Tj1woduKO5I/AAAAAAAACt0/cPYf4BF0RVI/s320/cpt.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5637786149013044114" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:85%;">Things Not Worth Keeping, "we are taking these steps..."<br />as part of <span style="font-style: italic;">Paper Cuts</span> at Camden People's Theatre, London, March 2003<br />image by TNWK<br /></span></div><br /><br /><a name="note15"><span style="font-weight: bold;">[15] </span></a>The BRITISH-IRISH-POETS listserv at JISCMail. The <a href="https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A1=ind97&amp;L=BRITISH-IRISH-POETS&amp;F=&amp;S=&amp;O=D&amp;H=0&amp;D=0&amp;T=1">public archives</a> reach back as far as February 1997, at which point the conversation is already in full flow. I was an over-eager participant in that list for a while, starting in December 1999, and dropping off the twig the following autumn, but making an incessant blaring nuisance of myself during the intervening period. Interestingly, this period exactly coincides with the months after my bipolar diagnosis. <a href="#back15"><span style="font-weight: bold;">[^]</span></a><br /><br /><a name="note16"><span style="font-weight: bold;">[16] </span></a>'Mobile Arts, an Industrial and Provident Society delivering community arts projects in a range of media throughout Wiltshire, 1984-88.' (description from cheek's own <a href="http://freespace.virgin.net/mcleer.bridge/cheek.html">resumé</a>, 2002) <a href="#back16"><span style="font-weight: bold;">[^]</span></a><br /><br /><a name="note17"><span style="font-weight: bold;">[17] </span></a>"Co-Accident, which consisted of Alec Bernstein, Kirby Malone, Chris Mason, and Marshall Reese, was a poetry music collective founded in 1977. They worked with the interplay of live and taped voice, percussion and instrumentation. They used voices, texts, scores, traditional and homemade instruments, electronics, videotape, computers and improvisation to present, in performance, a variety of texts and sounds simultaneously." (lifted from Robert Hampson, <a href="http://www.pores.bbk.ac.uk/1/Robert%20Hampson,%20%27cris%20cheek%20in%20manhattan%27.htm">'cris cheek in Manhattan'</a>) <a href="#back17"><span style="font-weight: bold;">[^]</span></a><br /><br /><a name="note18"><span style="font-weight: bold;">[18] </span></a>When we talked, cris had recently been at a conference, <a href="http://legaciesofmodernism.blogspot.com/">'Legacies of Modernism: the state of British poetry today'</a>, hosted by the Université Paris-Diderot, and attended by a large number of poets and critics working either within or in spitting distance of the academy. The panel on the second afternoon entitled 'Poetry and Performativity' -- Will Montgomery on E. E. Vonna-Michell's <a href="http://thewire.co.uk/articles/1557/">'Balsam Flex'</a> cassettes (to which cheek was a contributor); Vincent Broqua on Caroline Bergvall; and cheek's "provisional transatlantic communities" paper -- was, I'm told, notably sparsely attended by the contingent of delegates more closely involved with Cambridge and its legacies. Notwithstanding my optimistic remarks in the introduction to <span style="font-style: italic;">Better Than Language</span>, the water remains boringly wide. <a href="#back18"><span style="font-weight: bold;">[^]</span></a><br /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-MSDrdijZUr4/Tj1woXsNJjI/AAAAAAAACuE/_w7nvLqSDP4/s1600/prynne%2521.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-MSDrdijZUr4/Tj1woXsNJjI/AAAAAAAACuE/_w7nvLqSDP4/s320/prynne%2521.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5637786147394233906" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:85%;">L to R: J.H. Prynne enjoys the sunshine; a thousand miles of psychic no-man's-land (not pictured); TNWK foyer/window installation as part of Total Writing London, Camden People's Theatre, June 2003<br />image by TNWK<br /></span></div><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">* * *<br /></div><br />Finally, a little cris cheek jukebox -- a cheekbox, if you will -- so those who are unfamiliar with his work can get an ear-handle on it at least.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><br /><embed src="http://www.box.net//static/flash/box_explorer.swf?widget_hash=cxcesi9s5fgl1xnybyg0&amp;v=1&amp;cl=0&amp;s=0" wmode="transparent" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" height="345" width="460"></embed><br /><br /></div><br /><br />The tracks are:<br /><br />1. cris cheek w/ Sianed Jones: opening of "Stranger"<br />from the Sound &amp; Language album <span style="font-style: italic;">skin upon skin </span>(1996)<br /><br />2. Slant (cheek / Jones / Jeck et al): "Litter"<br />from the These Records album <span style="font-style: italic;">Hive </span>(1989)<br /><br />3. cris cheek: "Public Announcement" (plus interview snippet)<br />from <a href="http://www.ubu.com/sound/radio_radio/"><span style="font-style: italic;">Radio Radio</span></a> program 4 (presenter/producer Martin Spinelli) (2003)<br /><br />4. cris cheek: "and fluff" (1981/82); text included in <span style="font-style: italic;">part: short life housing </span>(The Gig, 2009)<br />from a reading at Alan Golding's house, Louisville, KY, 20 February 2010<br /><br />5. Slant: "Sex"<br />from the Sound &amp; Language album <span style="font-style: italic;">the canning town chronicle... </span>(1994)<br /><br />6. cris cheek: extract from "Bamboo"<br />recorded at SoundEye, Cork, Ireland, 9 July 2005<br /><br />7. Things Not Worth Keeping / Coleridge Community College: "Neighbourhood Is"<br />from the TNWK / Taxi Gallery album <span style="font-style: italic;">Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner </span>(2005)<br /><br />8. Slant: "Tenement Courtyard"<br />from the Sound &amp; Language album <span style="font-style: italic;">Slant </span>(1993)Chris Goodehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17993698000314709291noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28051672.post-83573959374992291852011-08-01T07:30:00.007+01:002011-08-01T08:59:07.361+01:00Goodbye to the circus<span style="font-style: italic;"><br />I made a short series of these text/image pieces for the collaborative blog <a href="http://transductions.net/">Transductions</a>, early last year, and always meant to do more. Perhaps I will, sometime. This one seemed like the most successful, anyway, so I thought I'd post it here in case anyone missed it first time around.<br /><br />Thanks to David Rylance for his hospitality over at Transductions, and to Tom and Kier and Paul for their enthusiasm for this post on its initial outing.<br /><span style="font-style: italic;"><br /><br /><br /><br /></span></span><div style="text-align: center;"><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-PwOBvyZBMi8/TjRI0do5VnI/AAAAAAAACtc/yvT-y7k1qEA/s1600/c01.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 262px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-PwOBvyZBMi8/TjRI0do5VnI/AAAAAAAACtc/yvT-y7k1qEA/s320/c01.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5635209099893888626" border="0" /></a>I used to believe that the blank pages at the end of the book were for writing a different ending if you didn’t like the original ending.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-HDu1plukQTs/TjRI0PMXWDI/AAAAAAAACtU/7z2lUzWUEPU/s1600/c02.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 201px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-HDu1plukQTs/TjRI0PMXWDI/AAAAAAAACtU/7z2lUzWUEPU/s320/c02.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5635209096016123954" border="0" /></a>We used to believe that windfalls should be shared.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Z7WDAFSaFNg/TjRI0LWoylI/AAAAAAAACtM/uVS1rnaZz9w/s1600/c03.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 296px; height: 320px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Z7WDAFSaFNg/TjRI0LWoylI/AAAAAAAACtM/uVS1rnaZz9w/s320/c03.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5635209094985468498" border="0" /></a>We used to believe our sins were transformed unto the chicken, and then we killed it.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-8EJTcU9k-nU/TjRIz4nVeyI/AAAAAAAACtE/EFeww7PUdVc/s1600/c04.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 238px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-8EJTcU9k-nU/TjRIz4nVeyI/AAAAAAAACtE/EFeww7PUdVc/s320/c04.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5635209089955232546" border="0" /></a>We used to believe in innocence until guilt was proved by a court. Not any longer.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-sG_LlvWSYX8/TjRIz2GR2gI/AAAAAAAACs8/EI4bmlXZ6TU/s1600/c05.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 301px; height: 320px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-sG_LlvWSYX8/TjRIz2GR2gI/AAAAAAAACs8/EI4bmlXZ6TU/s320/c05.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5635209089279711746" border="0" /></a>I used to believe that a mile is a mile.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-a1Jtpl1MpSM/TjRIi97uZWI/AAAAAAAACs0/gZbq-O4Prok/s1600/c06.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 266px; height: 320px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-a1Jtpl1MpSM/TjRIi97uZWI/AAAAAAAACs0/gZbq-O4Prok/s320/c06.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5635208799325152610" border="0" /></a>We used to believe that people living with HIV and AIDS were someone else.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5TWkbr-AE_s/TjRIiw5LKiI/AAAAAAAACss/9EKo4u__YCI/s1600/c07.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 248px; height: 320px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5TWkbr-AE_s/TjRIiw5LKiI/AAAAAAAACss/9EKo4u__YCI/s320/c07.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5635208795824794146" border="0" /></a>We used to believe that gingival tissue destruction indicated that the bacteria were releasing acids that severed the fibrous gingival attachment apparatus.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-8rj6jMLvZo8/TjRIivOIAsI/AAAAAAAACsk/pcRg6wfJLA0/s1600/c08.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 318px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-8rj6jMLvZo8/TjRIivOIAsI/AAAAAAAACsk/pcRg6wfJLA0/s320/c08.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5635208795375796930" border="0" /></a>I used to believe that I would go crazy, and it was just a matter of time and circumstance to set off the powder keg of unreason.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-P5e7JYVq0f4/TjRIidtc21I/AAAAAAAACsc/dxnZ882nVbs/s1600/c09.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 256px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-P5e7JYVq0f4/TjRIidtc21I/AAAAAAAACsc/dxnZ882nVbs/s320/c09.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5635208790675348306" border="0" /></a>We used to believe in the good old days.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-sXpy6rnw7-I/TjRIiXQdWFI/AAAAAAAACsU/9Apo04Ni-Uc/s1600/c10.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 218px; height: 320px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-sXpy6rnw7-I/TjRIiXQdWFI/AAAAAAAACsU/9Apo04Ni-Uc/s320/c10.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5635208788943132754" border="0" /></a>I used to believe a little penguin lived in my refrigerator and his job was to turn the interior light on and off.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-i8KqlMS8ph4/TjRIKMsc8WI/AAAAAAAACsM/50JZmdIXmrU/s1600/c11.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 247px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-i8KqlMS8ph4/TjRIKMsc8WI/AAAAAAAACsM/50JZmdIXmrU/s320/c11.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5635208373790896482" border="0" /></a>We used to believe that music was a sacred place and not some fucking bank machine.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-q1uUxSCkGuM/TjRIJwCy1fI/AAAAAAAACsE/kixUoMKDdos/s1600/c12.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 217px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-q1uUxSCkGuM/TjRIJwCy1fI/AAAAAAAACsE/kixUoMKDdos/s320/c12.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5635208366099977714" border="0" /></a>We used to believe that a fair shot, i.e., non- discriminatory treatment, was equality.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-OGzWgswCTlQ/TjRIJv8O9LI/AAAAAAAACr8/LE4ylZiEBws/s1600/c13.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 256px; height: 320px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-OGzWgswCTlQ/TjRIJv8O9LI/AAAAAAAACr8/LE4ylZiEBws/s320/c13.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5635208366072460466" border="0" /></a>We used to believe that chocolate milk came from brown cows because our Daddy told us it did.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-b1lo8FOBpKU/TjRIJnraKsI/AAAAAAAACr0/DqInYBYLzvA/s1600/c14.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 304px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-b1lo8FOBpKU/TjRIJnraKsI/AAAAAAAACr0/DqInYBYLzvA/s320/c14.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5635208363854408386" border="0" /></a>I used to believe that my penis was a shit and a woman’s vagina was a toilet.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-E3ivBKl7ZBA/TjRIJaPdA4I/AAAAAAAACrs/Xw491j776G4/s1600/c15.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 314px; height: 320px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-E3ivBKl7ZBA/TjRIJaPdA4I/AAAAAAAACrs/Xw491j776G4/s320/c15.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5635208360247493506" border="0" /></a>I used to believe that marriage would diminish me, reduce my options.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-GTXYWZJb7Hs/TjRHvqVQz2I/AAAAAAAACrk/LL6cjiC9NFQ/s1600/c16.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 214px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-GTXYWZJb7Hs/TjRHvqVQz2I/AAAAAAAACrk/LL6cjiC9NFQ/s320/c16.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5635207917890228066" border="0" /></a>I used to believe that Kleck’s estimate of DGU’s was correct, but overwhelming evidence to the contrary has convinced me otherwise.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-utpHO_jlTww/TjRHvlj8uRI/AAAAAAAACrc/xJvN08YQsno/s1600/c17.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 222px; height: 320px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-utpHO_jlTww/TjRHvlj8uRI/AAAAAAAACrc/xJvN08YQsno/s320/c17.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5635207916609648914" border="0" /></a>We used to believe that forests could be managed only as a one-harvest crop.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-fFjK3GHZgys/TjRHvW7vPkI/AAAAAAAACrU/5lb6W3LgSfY/s1600/c18.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 222px; height: 320px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-fFjK3GHZgys/TjRHvW7vPkI/AAAAAAAACrU/5lb6W3LgSfY/s320/c18.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5635207912682896962" border="0" /></a>We used to believe that God personally held each of the stars in place in the sky.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-fqTaoVfTcBE/TjRHvBWOpXI/AAAAAAAACrM/JQeMtx2B3s4/s1600/c19.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 204px; height: 320px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-fqTaoVfTcBE/TjRHvBWOpXI/AAAAAAAACrM/JQeMtx2B3s4/s320/c19.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5635207906888426866" border="0" /></a>I used to believe in forever, but forever is too good to be true.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-g21cM4LgNg8/TjRHvBo5vyI/AAAAAAAACrE/izeSpxNzPO4/s1600/c20.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 297px; height: 300px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-g21cM4LgNg8/TjRHvBo5vyI/AAAAAAAACrE/izeSpxNzPO4/s320/c20.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5635207906966748962" border="0" /></a>We used to believe in [Incomprehensible]<br /></div><br /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">* * *<br /></div><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">Sources:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Texts:</span> among top Google search returns (6th February 2010) for sentences beginning “I used to believe…” or “We used to believe…”<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Images:</span> among top Google image search returns (6th February 2010) for “hopeless circus performers”, “jaded circus performers”, “disappointing circus”, “desolate circus”, “pointlessness of circus”, “the circus is depressing”, “circus performers self-harm”, “circus suicide”, “circus of shit” and “circus I gave you everything.”Chris Goodehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17993698000314709291noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28051672.post-9904794892572018802011-07-31T09:30:00.000+01:002011-07-31T09:30:00.437+01:00The finger and the moon<span style="font-style: italic;">This was going to be the introduction to a much bigger post that I don't now think I'm ever going to write, so rather than let it languish in Drafts Purgatory I thought I'd post this little bit on its own :)</span><br /><br /><br />Look! Come quickly! Wallace Shawn is pointing at the moon!<br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-xc1TPeg2dsM/TcRf0V99pXI/AAAAAAAACo8/o3vSD6DN8yM/s1600/finger-moon-hotei.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 275px; height: 400px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-xc1TPeg2dsM/TcRf0V99pXI/AAAAAAAACo8/o3vSD6DN8yM/s400/finger-moon-hotei.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5603709189210613106" border="0" /></a><br /><div></div>Oh, all right, it's not really <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/mar/28/interview-wallace-shawn-theatre">Wallace Shawn</a>. (<span style="font-style: italic;">So they say.</span>) It's Budai (or Hotei), the Laughing Buddha. He's pointing at the moon to remind us about a story from the Shurangama Sutra:<br /><br /><blockquote>The Buddha told Ánanda, "You and others like you still listen to the Dharma with the conditioned mind, and so the Dharma becomes conditioned as well, and you do not obtain the Dharma-nature. This is similar to a person pointing his finger at the moon to show it to someone else. Guided by the finger, the other person should see the moon. If he looks at the finger instead and mistakes it for the moon, he loses not only the moon but the finger also. Why, because he mistakes the pointing finger for the bright moon.</blockquote><br />This is a big moment for The Buddha because he's making a point that's going to end up in <span style="font-style: italic;">Enter the Dragon</span>:<br /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><object style="height: 350px; width: 500px"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/2d5o8d1kitM?version=3"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/2d5o8d1kitM?version=3" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" height="350" width="500"></embed></object><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><br />(How much more fun the Shurangama Sutra would be if that story began: 'The Buddha told Ánanda, "Kick me!"')<br /><br />We've started, a little unexpectedly perhaps, in the world of Buddhist teaching and martial arts, because I was interested to try and discover the origins of a proposition contained in remarks made during a recent talk by <a href="http://sirkenrobinson.com/skr/">Ken Robinson</a>: a <a href="http://vimeo.com/21195297">sermon on 'passion'</a>, as part of the popular series of secular sermons at the Conway Hall in London, organized by the excellent <a href="http://www.theschooloflife.com/">School of Life</a>. Robinson is someone who keeps popping up lately, though I only really started paying attention when a few people on Twitter made a fuss, rightly, about <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U">this gorgeous animated film</a> based on a recent Robinson talk on the premises and structures of education: it's startlingly cogent and ultimately rather moving.<br /><br />I really recommend watching the whole of Robinson's sermon, too, not least for his easy, charismatic way with "public speaking", to which he is clearly (quietly) virtuosically accustomed. Getting everyone to sing along with 'Eye of the Tiger' may have more than a touch of <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCdX3wv5wlw#t=7m30s">David Brent</a> about it, but once Robinson simply starts to make contact with his congregation, his easy, laconic, anecdotal style is very easy to warm to and the whole talk is a pleasure. Anyway, the bit that particularly leapt out at me (it starts at about 25 minutes in to the video, if you want to skip straight there) was this:<br /><br /><div style="text-align: left;"><blockquote>I'm convinced that the most distinctive feature of human life is [the] power of imagination. ... If you take a small baby into the garden ... at night, and point at the moon, the baby will look at the moon. If you take your <span style="font-style: italic;">dog</span> into the garden and point at the moon, the dog will look at your finger. ... Human beings are born with expansive imaginations, and a sense of reference and possibility.<br /></blockquote></div><br />Those who know me too well will already have guessed where this is going. Much though I take Robinson's point about the significance of expansive imagination, I'd have to say I'm basically on the side of the dog in this.<br /><br />I don't know whether Robinson's source here is the teaching of the Buddha, or Bruce Lee, or direct personal experience with a set of babies and dogs under laboratory conditions, or what; but I do think it's important to look again at that Buddhist parable: in which it is not simply that we are encouraged, as Lee suggests to his hapless protégé, to look at the moon rather than missing the point (so to speak) by fixating on the finger; rather, we are told not to <span style="font-style: italic;">mistake</span> the finger for the moon. Other renditions, particularly in Zen teaching, make this more explicit: the <span style="font-style: italic;">words</span> of the teaching are not the <span style="font-style: italic;">point</span> of the teaching, and understanding the teaching and understanding the words from which it is composed are not at all the same thing.<br /><br />But the lack of expansive (or, we might say, extrapolatory) imagination in the dog, who does not in this instance comprehend the sign of the pointing finger, is not a mistake -- in fact, it is more or less the opposite of the mistake we are warned against. Whereas the baby interprets the pointing finger as a sign, a metaphor, the dog sees the finger as a finger, no more no less.<br /><br />In <a href="http://beescope.blogspot.com/2011/03/writing-is-on-wall.html">a recent post</a> I set up a binary -- slightly specious, like most binaries, but a workable distinction for thinking with -- opposing 'the window' and 'the wall' as two tendencies in poetic language-use. The window approach asks us to look through and beyond language, to treat it as transparent (or maybe, in poetry, translucent, or a little textured perhaps), a technology offering the empathetic spectator access to something beyond; the chicken, I guess, crossing the road in order to get to the other side. Others meanwhile ask us to look at the wall, to confront language as a material in itself, as a stuff in its own right, which does not refer to some remote picture, but presents pattern, texture, substance, colour, temperature. Most of these elements require us to get up close, to touch, to feel, to make contact. If we are looking for the window in the wall and cannot find it, we may initially think that there is nothing here to be seen, that we have come to a dead end with which no communication is possible. But actually, an intense experience of material presence, here and now and occurring wholly in reference to the range of creative means we have at our disposal for coming into relation with an object, is immediately and totally accessible to us.<br /><br />I don't know that "the window and the wall" is quite sophisticated enough a model to have much use except as a provocation: but I think "the finger and the moon" does something similar, and to more nuanced effect. We shouldn't take it as read that the dog, or the student, who sees the finger and not the moon, has missed out on the chance of beauty.<br /><br />For reasons I won't go into right now, I've been thinking a lot lately about <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/medieval-haecceity/"><span style="font-style: italic;">haecceity</span></a>, about how art can bring us into a relationship not only with metaphor, with the exercise of expansive or speculative imagination, but also with the 'thisness' of stuff: and this is not a constrained or stupefied reaction to a material encounter or event but rather an invitation to apprehend in the highest fidelity what it is that we meet in meeting the world. Nor is the secularism of this materialist task so militant that it can't yield its own reflective and even devotional pleasures -- think for example of Gerard Manley Hopkins riffing on Scotus in <a href="http://www.bartleby.com/122/34.html">'As kingfishers catch fire'</a>:<br /><br /><blockquote>Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:<br />Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;<br />Selves—goes itself; <span style="font-style: italic;">myself</span> it speaks and spells,<br />Crying <span style="font-style: italic;">Whát I do is me: for that I came.</span><br /></blockquote><br />(Yes, I'm afraid I too wonder whether the <a href="http://www.datamath.org/Speech/SpeaknSpell.htm">Speak &amp; Spell</a> was named after Hopkins's poem...)<br /><br />In other words, even if Bruce Lee's advice -- "Don't think, feel!" -- were at all to be trusted, it's not as if "seeing the finger" is wholly cerebral in its promise (or perceiving the beauty of the moon, for that matter, a sub-rational act).<br /><br />Moreover, even if we accept and value Robinson's fairly explicit premise that the expansive imagination is what separates humans from other animals, I am interested in the extension response that mines <span style="font-style: italic;">downwards</span> rather than travelling <span style="font-style: italic;">outwards</span>. In our example, I suppose this would be the dog that sees the finger <span style="font-style: italic;">and</span> the sign, but does not produce out of this recognition any impulse to treat the sign as an instruction to be obeyed and (by the same extension) a catalyst, whose purpose is wholly instrumental and whose import vanishes on use, a message that will self-destruct. This dog sees the finger and understands at some level that the owner-operator of the finger is <span style="font-style: italic;">using</span> rather than simply <span style="font-style: italic;">showing</span> the finger, or is not merely showing the finger but is <span style="font-style: italic;">intentionally</span> showing the finger. It is a finger that, as well as speaking and spelling itself, speaks of wanting. As Hopkins suggests, it cries with the intensity of the noun becoming a verb.<br /><br />The baby that follows the finger but immediately dispenses with it except in respect of its utility value, and by extension (or expansion) sees the moon, and might or might not find the moon 'beautiful', is learning how to go to the (Hollywood) cinema, and how to read most mainstream poetry. The (admittedly slightly enhanced) dog that sees the finger, and, rather than interpreting its semiotic significance, instead appreciates and reflects on the fingerness of the finger, its connotation of gesturality <span style="font-style: italic;">at all</span>, and the human desire out of which the technology of gesture arises, has invented theatre. (But of course in saying 'cinema' and 'theatre' here I am describing kinds or qualities of relationship that may have nothing to do with particular instances of the events that might take place in buildings bearing those names.)<br /><br />And so, after the <a href="http://beescope.blogspot.com/2007/11/all-you-get-is-sensory-titillation.html">Cat Test</a>, the Dog Test. The dog does not fail to see the performance matrix (in Michael Kirby's terms), and does not require that the matrix is eliminated or disavowed. All it asks in return is that it be allowed to establish its principal (and perhaps only) line of relation with actualities. The object is not dependent on its place in a system that requires it always to signal beyond itself to an ulterior meaning. The object suffices in itself. This allows the dog, too, to suffice, and to exist on the same plane as the object. The Dog Test, like the Cat Test, is an experiment in acceptance; it describes an uncapitalist space, wherein our first thought is of the thing itself, not of what it can be exchanged for.<br /><br />So I really want to see those fingers.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">No animals were harmed in the making of this post.</span>Chris Goodehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17993698000314709291noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28051672.post-19798908018183311702011-07-29T19:50:00.007+01:002011-07-30T02:22:38.883+01:00Forces in motionAll righty then, join in if you know the words -- all together now: "I'm sorry it's been so quiet here lately."<br /><br />But I am. I don't like the feeling that the blog's being neglected. It's a bit like having a garden and not, you know, <span style="font-style: italic;">tending </span>it. (I like how the word 'tending' has survived in that context. What else can you still tend? Not tend <span style="font-style: italic;">to</span>,<span style="font-style: italic;"> </span>but tend. Apart from a garden, and the things in it, like plants and what-have-you? ...Oh, sheep, I suppose. Hm. This needs further investigation. By which I mean, this needs forgetting about immediately.)<br /><br />Anyway, look, here I am, and I have to admit I'm super-tired at the end of a long hard day with my face pressed uncomfortably up against the granite slab of a daunting deadline. All done and dusted, I'm pleased to say, but I've been at my desk since a little after 6am, and I'm feeling a bit spaced-out and woozified. Not least because I just stupidly ate two meringues -- having fallen off the low carb wagon in L.A. and never properly climbed back on again, I've now replaced it with a fad diet where I'm only allowed to eat food that rhymes with the word "boomerangs" -- and had a bit of a blood-sugar wibble, followed by an inadvertent swivel on my desk chair when I was least expecting it. So now I'm properly wonked.<br /><br />Which reminds me. I've been on a rollercoaster since I was last here. (So all those claims to be insanely busy are instantly revealed to be transparently fraudulent.) I've been making this piece, <span style="font-style: italic;">Where We Meet</span>, and it's about the sea, a bit, so we thought we might go to the seaside and sit by the sea and do some writing, like proper artists. Except we chose Southend-on-Sea, because it was close-ish to London, and, never having been there, I didn't realise at the point that I agreed with this course of action that there's a theme park there. With rides and everything. I'm not a very ridesy sort of person. Even the descending lift at the Premier Inn in Lancaster, where I stayed with Jonny last Saturday night (at the hotel, I mean, not actually in the lift), was enough to give me more thrills than I was seeking, frankly. But here's the thing: now I'm 38, I'm beginning to form a phantom list somewhere in my brain, a task that kicks in like a screensaver every so often when I'm on the bus or scrambling an egg, the inevitable "things to do before I'm 40" list, and going on a rollercoaster was pretty much at the top of that list. (To be honest the only other things I've come up with so far have been: Go to Latitude; and, have sex with a lady. I don't know which is the more likely to exacerbate my chilblains.)<br /><br />Anyway, though I couldn't locate much <span style="font-style: italic;">actual </span>enthusiasm for the idea, I did decide to toss caution gingerly into the bleak Essex wind, and we all got on this damn rollercoaster. I mean it wasn't a <span style="font-style: italic;">proper </span>rollercoaster. I drew the line at upside-downness, at least for my first go, which meant we ended up on something that, though it looked like it went at quite a hurtle, did, I must admit, have a smiling dragon face on the front of it. As we waited our turn we watched a batch of quite small children arrive back from their circuit, looking as thoroughly bored and unmoved as if they'd just been on a fairground ride themed around the 1970s tv programme <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYz8QWDxzkk">"Houseparty"</a>. So, well, obviously, I was pretty terrified by the whole thing: while my travelling companions were gamely announcing variants on "Woooo!" and "Yayyy!" as is customary, I was making a series of considerably quieter observations using combinations of the words "shit" and "fuck". But in those moments where the naked fear receded, I'm afraid I found that, rather than being exhilarated by the rush of adrenalin, I was mostly annoyed. Not bored, exactly, but feeling a deep sense of being unnecessarily inconvenienced. It is, after all, a really fatuously elaborate way of not going anywhere; if, after all that strange unseductive lurching, you ended up at Didcot Parkway, that at least would be something. But, ah, perhaps I need to go to Blackpool, or Sandusky, Ohio, and ride a real rollercoaster, a <span style="font-style: italic;">man's</span> rollercoaster, and have multiple G's rammed down my inverted wazoo. If so, I hope you'll excuse me if I don't take scrupulous pains to ensure that I do so before I'm 40; with a bit of luck, very shortly after that I shall anyway be dead, and the situation won't arise, or most of me will have been amputated due to meringue-related diabetes complications, and my remaining portions can loop whichever loops they must while safely ensconced in somebody's Tupperware container or plastic bag.<br /><br />Anyway. Y'know. <a href="http://www.snotr.com/video/917/RollerCoaster_Tycoon_massacre">This.</a><br /><br />None of which reflects on the infinitely greater pleasure of making that piece, <span style="font-style: italic;">Where We Meet</span> -- notwithstanding the deplorable fact that in the end we did zero writing by the sea. So, this is my new piece for home performance, the first since last year's <span style="font-style: italic;">Henry &amp; Elizabeth </span>(which I hope will tour again next spring, all being equal), and a very different kettle of ball games. For the first time, I'm making a piece for domestic performance where the audience comes to us, rather than inviting us over to theirs. In a way this is a curious route to go down, given that the home pieces have always been about transforming other people's living space. But something happened during <span style="font-style: italic;">H&amp;E </span>that I was interested to explore further. There's a scene in that show where the character Elizabeth is sitting up in bed, reading -- so, Claire, the brilliant actor playing Elizabeth, would get into bed in time for the audience's arrival in the bedroom. There's normally stuff that happens in a bedroom, in these shows, but I don't think we've staged anything where one of the characters is actually <span style="font-style: italic;">in</span> our hosts' bed, and I was surprised (and a bit delighted) that in a lot of the places we went, this minor transgression created a sort of tickled-but-nervous frisson in the audience. And the same would often happen later during the same scene when the audience would be able to hear the other character, Henry, brushing his teeth in the bathroom. There were gigs where this would seem to blow people's minds!<br /><br />The bedroom and the bathroom are the two rooms we've most often been asked <span style="font-style: italic;">not</span> to use in performance -- it's always up to the hosts to tell us where's in and out of bounds -- and, needless to say, wherever people's anxiety is at its wiggy-outmost, that's where the art needs to be made. So, audiences for <span style="font-style: italic;">Where We Meet</span> will be asked to watch a two-part performance that takes place firstly in a bedroom, and then in a bathroom. It will be interesting to see whether it not being <span style="font-style: italic;">their </span>bedroom and bathroom entirely alleviates that discomfort.<br /><br />The show is conceived as a diptych: two short separate pieces that nonetheless (hopefully) speak to each other and amount to something more than their sum. Both of the pieces arise out of encounters between the worlds of poetry and visual art. The first piece, in the bedroom, is inspired by those Hockney cancellation plates that <a href="http://beescope.blogspot.com/2010/11/speaking-about-love.html">I posted about a while ago</a>, and draws on the tone of those images and the Cavafy poems to which they refer; the second imagines an encounter between, or at least a superimposition of, figures based on the conceptual artist <a href="http://www.basjanader.com/">Bas Jan Ader</a> and the poet <a href="http://jacketmagazine.com/20/index.shtml">Veronica Forrest-Thomson</a>, two artists who had exquisitely interesting and complicated relationships with the idea of meaning, and both of whom died in 1975 in ambiguous circumstances that point inconclusively towards suicide and/or accidental death.<br /><br />So I guess thematically (especially given the anachronic reading I can't help making of Hockney's mid-60s prints in the light of the subsequent devastation of the post-liberation gay community by the AIDS epidemic) it's quite a doomy, deathy sort of affair, all told: but actually working on these two pieces hasn't felt like that at all. In those small domestic spaces, and partly I think because there's such a lot of nudity in both works, it feels like actually there's going to be an incredibly powerful and beautiful sense of presence -- intimacy, proximity, tactility. <span style="font-style: italic;">Where We Meet</span>, as a phrase, is a tiny fragment of one of the Cavafy poems we've been working with, and initially I thought it might refer to home, or to bed -- and I suppose it still does -- but more and more the meeting it seems to be invoking is the one that we do in the psychic, sometimes erotic space between our two (or more) bodies.<br /><br />It's very early days for <span style="font-style: italic;">Where We Meet</span> -- we've spent just a very few days working on each of the pieces -- but we're giving the draft show a little test run in Edinburgh, from Tuesday 23 to Saturday 27 August, at 9.30pm each evening. We're not in the Fringe programme, in fact this is all very under the radar, but hey, that's how you and I met in the first place, right?, so maybe you'd like to come along. The only problem with that is, the show's for an audience of two at a time (for now -- we might stretch to four in future runs!), so only ten people can see it in Edinburgh. I'm not quite sure how to organize this without turning it into a kind of Willy Wonka golden ticket thing, which would be horribly unseemly. Though also a giggle I suppose. Anyway, for the time being, if you think you might want to see one of the Edinburgh shows, <a href="mailto:mail@chrisgoodeonline.com">drop me a line</a> or something. It's probably not the biggest-fun show you can see at 9.30 in the evening in the last week of the Fringe, but if you like being really close to incredibly smart and talented people while they're gratuitously naked -- come on, eh, it's always a <span style="font-style: italic;">little bit</span> gratuitous, that's what makes it lovely -- you might find it a nice kind of headspace to be in for an hour or so.<br /><br />Two of the performers of <span style="font-style: italic;">Where We Meet</span>, Jonny Liron and Tomas Weber, were also to be found down at the ever-more-brilliant Stoke Newington International Airport last night, where we did the launch for my new anthology of young modernist poets, <a href="http://www.ganzfeldpress.com/2011/07/new-title.html"><span style="font-style: italic;">Better Than Language</span></a>. Eleven of the thirteen poets in the book were there to read, and the other two were read in their absence, and almost everyone read for longer than they were supposed to, and after a decade of putting on readings I <span style="font-style: italic;">still</span> don't know how to stop that happening, and I'm sorry to those who struggled to get home as a consequence, but it wasn't like it was Cambridge Misc Fest 4-in-the-morning weeping-with-tiredness long, and anyway actually it was bloody great: the kind of intensely compacted night I'd expected became instead an adventurously long and searching and celebratory one, and I felt more than ever that the book needed to be made: which was nice, because I'd already made it. On Twitter earlier, Andy Field extemporised the perfect blurb for the anthology: "It's what I imagine your first time trying to water-ski must be like. Exhilarating, bumpy confusion followed by something suddenly sublime." If that sounds like something in which you recognize your own aspirations -- or the aspirations of the people you're hoping will start the revolution for you while you sit around playing fucking Ninjabread Man for the Fake Wii -- you might like to know that I'm extending the pre-publication discount on orders till Monday (just because I can't particularly be bothered to get in there and change the Paypal button code right now) so you can still <a href="http://www.ganzfeldpress.com/2011/07/new-title.html">grab a copy</a> for £10 +p&amp;p. And, you know, I love you heaps and you have nice hair and everything but I really think you'd be a massive seeping douchebag not to get one.<br /><br />Oh and while we're on the subject of publishing and/or being damned, I'm really really happy to say that to coincide with the upcoming Edinburgh run of <span style="font-style: italic;">The Adventures of Wound Man and Shirley</span> (in its new intimate unplugged stripped-back no-bells-no-whistles let's-face-it-we've-totally-run-out-of-money version), the lovely people at Oberon are publishing the script. So now you too can perform it in the comfort of your own breakdown. I'll give you a shout when it's out. It's going to be fab. (A really pleasing by-product of all of this, by the way, is that it's put me back in touch with Andrew Walby, who's now Senior Editor at Oberon but who I met about eight years ago when he and his erstwhile collaborating partner Helena Sands brought into CPT a piece called <a href="http://www.cptheatre.co.uk/event_details.php?eventid=34&amp;sectionid=home"><span style="font-style: italic;">When I Close My Eyes I See You</span></a>, which was full of soil and Celan and which I often think of as being perhaps my favourite thing I programmed while I was running the joint.)<br /><br />Something else I'll alert you to, if and when it emerges, is footage of my reading at <a href="http://otherroom.org/">The Other Room</a> in Manchester last week with Jonny Liron and Tamarin Norwood. It was a tricky gig for me, to be honest: I found it hard to get my groove on and my ducks in a row (or even <span style="font-style: italic;">vice versa</span>), though it was nobody's fault, except maybe mine for having one drink too many before kick-off. I guess my personal preference is to read without a mic where possible, and to have a bit more room to pace back and forth like one of the demented polar bears that used to be such a fantastic advert for Bristol Zoo when I was growing up. But still I wish I'd settled a little sooner. Nonetheless, a new longish poem called 'Weird Science' seemed to go over effectively, and the even longer 'DSM-5 is a Rock Chick' can generally dependably hold its own. -- Anyway, my own shortcomings aside, it was a really good evening: great to catch up even briefly with Scott Thurston and a bit more expansively with Geraldine Monk, whose gorgeous new <a href="http://www.leafepress.com/catalog/monk/lsandf.html"><span style="font-style: italic;">Lobe Scarps &amp; Finials</span></a>, from the very useful <a href="http://www.leafepress.com/">Leafe Press</a>, includes the still-breathtaking 'A Nocturnall Upon S. Lucies Day' ("A Collaboration with John Donne") which Geraldine incredibly kindly wrote for me back in 2004 when I left CPT. And terrific to hear the other readers, too: Jonny was on fantastic, boisterous, unnerving form, and it was a huge pleasure to meet and hear the brilliant <a href="http://www.tamarinnorwood.co.uk/">Tamarin Norwood</a>. (Do, if you can, get hold of her book <a href="http://www.tamarinnorwood.co.uk/project/do-something/"><span style="font-style: italic;">Do Something</span></a>: it's the funniest work of wordless experimental literature I've ever read.)<br /><br />The Other Room came at the end of a five-day sojourn in Manchester which was intended to be a bit of a holiday but turned into nothing of the sort. I was chatting with work friends the other day and everyone seems to be feeling, as I certainly feel, really squeezed at the moment. It's more of a struggle to make ends meet right now than it's been for a while and the first casualty is breathing space. So everywhere I go feels really uncomfortably squeezed by the stuff either side of it in the calendar or in the city or in my head. Five days in an apartment in Manchester vanished in a rainy trice, leaving my credit card bruised and my mind and body a bit un-unwound.<br /><br />But it was good catching the end of the International Festival. It was <span style="font-style: italic;">The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic </span>that took us up there in the first place (The Other Room gig was a happy coincidence) and, having been worried that it would be a total carcrash, I was absolutely thrilled by it as it turned out. Hugely frustrated too, I should hurry to say, especially by the opening 45 minutes of the show proper (after the fantastic prologue tableau of trotting, treat-snaffling dogs: I'd have happily watched that for another hour), which more or less suffocated under the leaden, fetishy <span style="font-style: italic;">esprit</span>-vacuum of Robert Wilson at his very stupidest. But from the first appearance of Antony [Hegarty] -- of whom I've never been a huge fan, until now -- seeing him live makes all the difference, and then some -- everything blossomed into a calmer, warmer humanity, out of which arose some genuinely extraordinary sequences and images, one in particular that I'm sure I'll never forget (and which, funnily, I can't find online anywhere, so I guess I'll just have to remember it anyway). Willem Dafoe was hugely accomplished doing something that almost throughout I strenuously wished he wasn't doing (though his song, prowling across a carpet of dry ice in the second half, was astounding); Abramovic was stilted and funny and ridiculous and beautiful and horrible and great; and Antony got under my skin like Ed Gein on a spree. (Oh I <span style="font-style: italic;">wish </span>I hadn't written that but now I can't possibly delete it.) And I thought the rest of the cast were -- mostly -- amazing: especially the extraordinary <a href="http://christopher-nell.de/">Christopher Nell</a>.<br /><br />The problem with Wilson's work these days, really -- which <span style="font-style: italic;">The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic </span>only exhibits really parlously in the long humourless wacky slog of those first 45 minutes or so -- is that he has turned a useful observation (about how you "can't" do anything on stage -- not walk, not sit, not anything -- as you would do it <span style="font-style: italic;">off </span>stage, so these things have to be reconfigured from scratch) into an inert, self-regarding maxim, in all its joyless narcissism a perfect self-harming match for that Abramovic who, remember, <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/oct/03/interview-marina-abramovic-performance-artist">"hates" theatre</a>. As narrative falls away from the piece and a logic (or intelligent liquidity) of images takes over, this fake rigour of Wilson's is at least somewhat dispelled, and for the first time in ages you can see something of the edgeless romantic equanimity of his early 70s work.<br /><br />In the light of that question around the stultifications that emerge out of what we might term mesmeric artifice, there is a good post to be written (which a younger, less tired me would have gladly attempted) about Kira O'Reilly's arsehole. ...Say wha'? OK. <span style="font-style: italic;">Life and Death... </span>sweetly incorporates earlier pieces made by some of the live artists who make up the performing company, including <a href="http://vimeo.com/15900495"><span style="font-style: italic;">Stair Falling</span></a>, O'Reilly's piece from 2009, which she showed at MIF's <span style="font-style: italic;">Marina Abramovic Presents...</span> in that year, and which is recreated here as part of a composite sequence of these other sampled works. O'Reilly "falls", with painstaking slowness and control, backwards downstairs; it's a terrific piece in its own right (though I've only seen video and photographic documentation of it, as per the above link). What's really interesting in the context of the Wilson re-version is that the rest of the show requires that she wears full body make-up -- everyone's artificially pale, a bit of dreary signalling just in case we're not aware we're in a theatre ;) -- but as O'Reilly "falls", at one point her buttocks are inevitably somewhat splayed and you can see the edge of the make-up, as far as it reaches, and the line of her un-made-up skin meeting it. Her glimpsed anus is not "covered" by the same contract of artifice as the rest of her body. Like <a href="http://beescope.blogspot.com/2006/12/on-voyeurism-participation.html">the Incident of Garry Collins's Semi-Erect Penis</a> that I celebrated some years ago, Kira O'Reilly's arsehole is not in the same stage space as everyone and everything else -- with the exception, actually, of Antony, who is incredibly charismatic precisely because performative matrix just drops off him like water off the proverbial duck. So actually the show I'm <span style="font-style: italic;">really </span>excited about here is the embedded, easter-eggish one where Antony Hegarty and Kira O'Reilly's arsehole are a double-act. (Oh, come on, it's not like you've never seen <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Em7gC0bq_aM">Antony singing next to an arsehole</a> before.)<br /><br />I also enjoyed <span style="font-style: italic;">11 Rooms </span>at Manchester Art Gallery -- eleven performance installations, each in its own room -- very much, though we went on its last afternoon so it was swamped with visitors (so much so that admissions were halted earlier than expected) and it was interesting how much that inflected the internal economy of the show -- simply, you start to have to wonder whether queueing for an installation for twenty minutes is "worth it", in an amusing echo, come to think of it, of Roman Ondak's piece in the show, <span style="font-style: italic;">Swap</span>, where you're invited to exchange any item in your possession for the one that the artist's representative currently has on the table in front of him, as long as you feel it's a fair swap. <span style="font-style: italic;">Swap </span>is a piece that doesn't go far enough, and like a couple of other performances in the show it's woefully over-telegraphed by its performer(s) when I see it. (No wonder all these live artists hate theatre, if that's all they think it can do.)<br /><br />For me the stand-outs are: Santiago Sierra's <span style="font-style: italic;">Veterans of the Wars of Northern Ireland, Afghanistan and Iraq Facing the Corner</span> <span style="font-style: italic;">-- </span>deeply troubling and radically unresolvable into a settled proposition; Laura Lima's piece <span style="font-style: italic;">MEN=Flesh/WOMEN=Flesh - Flat</span>, which requires you to lie down in order to make eye-contact with a disabled performer who also is lying down on the far side of a room whose ceiling is only two feet or so above its floor: I'd have liked to stay much longer with this, and would have if there hadn't been a buzzing queue waiting for me to move on, but even so (and perhaps because of this) it was an experience of fleeting profundity and upset; and the "empty" John Baldessari room which features only a wall-mounted trail of documentation tracing the ultimately thwarted efforts of the gallery to secure a dead body with which to realise Baldessari's proposed 'cadaver piece' installation -- a fascinating, dismaying insight into the absurd and amazing legislative frameworks we have in place to prevent us ever really seeing dead bodies in public spaces, unless we are unfortunate enough to live in a place where those frameworks are inexistent or commonly obliterated by violent incursion. I can't decide if co-curator Klaus Biesenbach, the most strident of the voices in this tracked dialogue, is a hero or a dick. He can, of course, be both, I guess.<br /><br />The other fun thing we did in Manchester was watch <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXRYA1dxP_0"><span style="font-style: italic;">The Tree of Life</span></a> in the fantastic Screen 1 at the Cornerhouse, one of those rare cinema spaces that's genuinely exciting to walk into. I can't say much about Malick's film that hasn't already been said <span style="font-style: italic;">ad nauseam</span> by now. It's an astounding achievement, jaw-dropping in its ambition and frequently breathtaking in its beauty and self-control. It's also preposterous beyond belief, not only in its bargain-bin CGI dinosaurs, but also in its implied thesis that the 13 billion years since the Big Bang have been a process flowing Vltava-like inexorably towards the American nuclear family, in all its befuddled violent well-meaning patriarchy, its fucking numinous Caucasian rectitude (the one scene with black people in it is presented like it's a trip to the fucking zoo), and its achingly bland heteronormative prettiness, with the fathomlessly boring Jessica Chastain the apotheosis of that blandness and prettiness. Also there is a <span style="font-style: italic;">lot</span> of v/o whispering, from which, dear reader, I eventually withdrew the benefit of the doubt. It all ends up a bit, er, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbe6zAjqOhY">this</a>. And yet, despite everything, you have to take your hat off to it, it's an extraordinary film, and by any standards a great American work of art: I mean it's American in every codon of its DNA. But it also made me want to rub footage of the L.A. riots and clips from the nastiest, most violent gay porn directly onto my eyeballs as an antidote.<br /><br />We got back from Manchester late on Thursday afternoon and I had to go straight over to QMUL where I was the guest on that evening's <a href="http://www.theargumentroom.net/">Argument Room</a>. This is a live format, streamed online, in which the excellent Chris Johnston (of <a href="http://www.rideout.org.uk/">Rideout</a> and many other worthwhile outfits, including <a href="http://www.fluxx.co.uk/">Fluxx</a> -- in which guise I first met him) talks to someone connected somehow with the arts and/or social justice, about their work and their thinking. They're still trialing it, prior to a more extended run later in the year, but the existing episodes -- the pilot, with the fascinating architect Will Alsop, and the first issue proper with Juliet Lyon of the Prison Reform Trust -- are both well worth watching, and, if I may disgustingly say so, I think ours was pretty successful too.<br /><br />The best, or at least the most welcome, thing about The Argument Room is the time that it allows itself. Even shorn of its interval break, the edited version of our episode runs close to two hours. I mean, wow, the luxury! How amazing, I notice, that even in the most upstream practice environments we so often ape the soundbite culture that we're nonetheless so quick to inveigh against. It was such a relief to have the time and space to really seriously explore some of the questions that arose. Even so, inevitably, much got touched on and then brushed aside, but still it was a thorough and expansive conversation -- especially in the second, longer half, which really <span style="font-style: italic;">became </span>a conversation after a first half that was more like a straight interview. (Too much like <span style="font-style: italic;">Desert Island Discs</span>, said one slightly disgruntled attendee, who found that first stretch a bit cosy: and perhaps rightly so, though the unexpected biographical element of the questioning -- taking me back to my childhood and so on -- did throw up some genuinely new insights for me into the -- actually, it turns out -- unbelievably predictable course of my entire life ever since the age of about three.)<br /><br />Anyway, you can watch it <a href="http://www.livestream.com/theargumentroom/video?clipId=pla_56a63c90-fd2b-4867-bc9d-af9b2376e8bb&amp;utm_source=lslibrary&amp;utm_medium=ui-thumb">here</a>, and, if you've the stomach for it (or, I don't know, doing it in instalments might help...), I'd really like it if you did. I reckon it's one of the best accounts of my work and my thinking that I've given to date. I'm really grateful to Sara Hyde for the invitation and to Chris Johnston, Poppy Spowage, Sylvan Baker and everyone else who got involved.<br /><br />One question that comes up a couple of times in the conversation and which, as you might see, I never really answer -- partly because it defeats me slightly, at least in one sense -- is (in relation to the idea, which I've occasionally rehearsed here and in other places in recent years, of a 24-hour 'rolling theatre' which you can drop in and spend time with whenever you want to), who gets to come? Who are the audience? Who has access?<br /><br />In the conversation I have a go at drawing out what the assumptions underlying the question might be -- that such a utopian, pious-sounding, civically grounded venue is only ever going to appeal to a white liberal middle-class intellectual audience. This is not quite accepted, and maybe that's right, maybe that's not what's being winkled out. But there <span style="font-style: italic;">is </span>an assumption, as far as I can see, that this new model theatre (which I keep positing more as a thought experiment about what theatre might look like if it were uncoupled from the language of capitalism and the apparatus of the marketplace, than as a wholly serious proposition about the future of recreational space: though I'm not <span style="font-style: italic;">un</span>-serious about it either, and given a chance to build it and see if anyone came, I'd jump at the opportunity for sure) would be likely to transfer with it many of the old model's problems with access and prestige.<br /><br />Lots of partly self-contradicting things jump into my throat at this point. It seems weird to me to imagine that, at least if this theatre model advertised blatantly enough its interest in and disposal towards a wholesale shift in how we live together socially, only those with a vested interest in the status quo would attend. Surely not! A big problem with theatre at the moment in relation to the audiences it can and can't attract is that most audiences want to see their own living aspirations somehow reflected in or refracted through or resonating within the work they're shown; we don't necessarily want to see work that's about us, but we want to see work that's about who we can (at some level) imagine being. We need to have our capacity for empathy, our ability to think and feel ourselves into new relationships, exercised. In work that isn't driven by a particular set of characters or an explicit narrative (both of which I imagine being absent in this model), you want to be a bit careful about who audiences see on stage; everybody needs to be up there at some point. But other than that, I can't see that anyone would necessarily feel excluded from such a space, except I suppose transitionally; at least, not excluded by dint of their spot on the demographic dial. The bottom line on access, for me, has always been the same: charge as little as you can; make sure no one is prevented from attending by your inadvertent carelessness or inhospitality; say hello to the people who show up. <span style="font-style: italic;">C'est tout.</span><br /><br />I must admit, though, I still can't quite bring myself to be OK with the idea that what I do <span style="font-style: italic;">starts</span> with its potential audience, except in the most ungraspable sense, a sense in which I don't <span style="font-style: italic;">yet</span> have any responsibility to that imagined audience, except speculatively and in principle. You certainly can't start with an audience you want to target and an impression (researched or otherwise -- usually, I'm afraid, it's otherwise) of what they might want to see, and work backwards from there. (If you're going to talk to folks in advance like that about what they'd like to see, it would anyway surely be more sensible to work with them on the making, too. Help them be in the show they think they want to watch, as my old pal Jazz-Hands Gandhi used to say.)<br /><br />The current toilet reading of one of my housemates -- this shows you the kind of house I live in -- is a book of essays on and interviews with the great <a href="http://tricentricfoundation.org/">Anthony Braxton</a>. And I read this today (for I, too, sometimes, though only ever as a last resort, go to the toilet), and I think it's great; he's talking about some of the reasons why he stopped working with the pianist (and Scientologist cockwad) Chick Corea:<br /><br /><blockquote>Chick was becoming more interested in what he called music that communicated more, whereas I wanted to continue with my work. Let me be clear on this, though -- I've always wanted my music to communicate: it was a question of priorities. The most important thing to me was my music: if it could communicate, great; if it couldn't, OK I accept the verdict, but I'm not changing my music in order to communicate. Because what would I be communicating? I mean, if you have to become somebody else to communicate, what is that? <span style="font-style: italic;">(Laughs.)</span><br /><div style="text-align: right;">Graham Lock, <span style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Forces-Motion-Thoughts-Anthony-Paperback/dp/0306803429/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1311988903&amp;sr=8-1">Forces in Motion: The music and thoughts of Anthony Braxton</a><br /></span>(Da Capo P., 1988, pp.88-89)<span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"></span></span></span></span></div></blockquote><div style="text-align: right;"><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"></span></span></span></div><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"></span><br /></span></span></span>This kind of sentiment is very often called elitist at the moment, as if it were somehow resistant to the idea of an honest negotiation of cohabitation and exchange in social space: whereas I think that's exactly what Braxton is safeguarding here. It's an admission of difference, and a statement of a refusal to colonise the experience of others. In other words, it's a more acute <span style="font-style: italic;">seeing </span>of an audience -- a shade, I suppose, of a nearly-lost meaning in the word 'discrimination' -- than any more compromising policy can enact on behalf of those others we might <span style="font-style: italic;">ourselves</span> be, before long, who knows.Chris Goodehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17993698000314709291noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28051672.post-50629370990104922262011-07-04T07:54:00.000+01:002011-07-04T07:54:00.627+01:00Do it yourselfMorning all,<br /><br />Today's the first day of a new devising project with <a href="http://www.whatsonstage.com/blogs/edinburgh2009/?p=991">Lucy Ellinson</a> and <a href="http://kcl.academia.edu/theron">Theron Schmidt</a>, and you can imagine I'm as excited as all murgatroyd to be sitting on the edge of that particular brink. Thought I'd just take five minutes to mention a couple of things to you, though, before I immerse myself, for who o who knows when I'll re-emerge.<br /><br />Firstly, I'm delighted to be one of the artists chosen to run a project in DIY8. DIY is an annual programme run by the indispensible Live Art Development Agency, in consort with numerous partners, in which training and development projects are conceived and run by artists for artists.<br /><br />My project's called <span style="font-weight: bold;">Queer Eye Enquiry: ways of not seeing straight</span>, and it sort of emerged out of the conversations at the D&amp;D satellite on queer theatre and performance that I hosted earlier in the year. Two things that came through very clearly were: a sense that the orthodoxies that queer has started to accumulate for itself have become really stultifying, especially (though not exclusively) for a younger generation of artists who, as a result, don't wish to identify themselves or their work as queer (a strategy with which I have some sympathy, though, as I said in the first half of <a href="http://beescope.blogspot.com/2011/03/writing-is-on-wall.html">this big post</a>, I have some doubts about it too); and a desire among artists making queer work -- whether or not they'd call it that -- to be working in ways that are as much about queer process as about queer "product" (we could do with a better word for that half of the binary), without necessarily feeling confident that they know or clearly understand for themselves what a queer process would be or look like.<br /><br />So, I've put together this fairly light-touch project, which you can be part of wherever you live, as it's being run in a decentred way, via mail and online channels -- except for the final session when all the participants will come together to say hello to each other in Birmingham (where we are the guests of Fierce, under whose aegis this particular DIY project is being run). <a href="http://www.thisisliveart.co.uk/prof_dev/diy/diy8_chris_goode.html">More details here</a>, including the application process (deadline is Friday 15th July). I do want to emphasize that the project isn't only open to artists who already identify as queer (or post-queer); one of the things I want to explore is the extent to which queer is a way of seeing, and a property of relationships, rather than something that inheres in individuals. That, really, is the entry point to a whole bunch of political and social ideas that I hope the project will be able to illuminate and investigate.<br /><br />I want to mention also that the whole DIY line-up this year, as with previous years, is well worth investigating. Naturally I hope you'll want to do mine, but there's plenty else to enjoy, including projects run by the excellent <a href="http://www.planbperformance.net/dan/">Dan Belasco Rogers</a>, the dauntingly legendary <a href="http://scottee.co.uk/">Scottee</a>, and the intriguing <a href="http://www.jamielewishadley.co.uk/">jamie lewis hadley</a>, whose work I don't know much about yet but sounds really exciting. A very strong political slant this year, a lot of stuff engaging with activism, psychogeography and sexual dissidence... Feel like I accidentally-on-purpose threw my hat into this particular ring at an especially interesting time.<br /><br />Speaking of DIY: you might remember that I mentioned here recently a new poetry anthology that I've edited -- given that I wanted to read it, and it didn't exist, y'know, that was just how it had to be: a little bit of do-it-yourself. So, after thirteen months' work and thirty-nine nosebleeds, I'm thrilled to say that <span style="font-style: italic;">Better Than Language</span> is now tremulously close to existing in the world -- official publication date is Monday 25th July. Here, look, it looks like this:<br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-DXlA02NhkIw/ThC1Z2kLPOI/AAAAAAAACq8/tK3l-5PIAzY/s1600/btl%2Bcover%2Bpromo.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 261px; height: 400px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-DXlA02NhkIw/ThC1Z2kLPOI/AAAAAAAACq8/tK3l-5PIAzY/s400/btl%2Bcover%2Bpromo.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5625195390334352610" border="0" /></a><br /><br />Cool, eh? What's more, Ganzfeld (i.e. me with a publisher's visor and cardigan on -- no, not <span style="font-style: italic;">just</span> a publisher's visor and cardigan, you saucy thing...) now has a <a href="http://www.ganzfeldpress.com/">web site</a> where you can order your copy of <span style="font-style: italic;">Better Than Language</span>, or buy <span style="font-style: italic;">The History of Airports </span>or COAT's <span style="font-style: italic;">copy of</span> CD if you don't have one of those yet.<br /><br />Or if you want to hang on and pick one up in person, there'll be launch events in London and Brighton -- see the sidebar on the <a href="http://www.ganzfeldpress.com/">Ganzfeld site</a> for details. The London launch is Thursday 28th July at Stoke Newington International Airport -- pop it in your diary, there's a love.<br /><br />Right, well, lots to do and performance artists coming round soon, so, I'm sorry, I'm going to have to scram. Apologies for the abrupt withdrawal, but you'll just have to finish yourself off. :)<br /><br />loves xxChris Goodehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17993698000314709291noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28051672.post-35641399078430803322011-06-28T15:25:00.000+01:002011-06-28T23:36:57.725+01:00Gevorts Box: Music for the head balletThere's still a lot of serious proper full-on capital-W writing to catch up on hereabouts, and I hope this week will provide at least the beginnings of an opportunity: but it's been a tough few days here at the Control Desk, and it's unfeasibly hot in here, so... I don't think I'm going to have it in me today, more's the pity. (*ringtone*... Sorry, let me just answer that... Hello? Yes? What's that? You say Dick Emery wants his innuendo back? etc.)<br /><br />Instead, it being a little while since I made you a music post, please enjoy the subjoined Summer 2011 issuance of Gevorts Box.<br /><br />This one is <span style="font-style: italic;">sort of</span> a bit more coherent, tonally or thematically or someotherhow, than previous episodes. The story so far is this:<br /><br />It having been a bit of a capital-W week of writing (and concomitant writhing), a great deal of displacement activity has gone on; while some tiny sector of my brain plugs away at whatever discombobulous impasse has overtaken the real work, the greater part of my conscious mind is up to other mischiefs entirely: this week, as so often, it's been about chasing down a whole series of recherche musical delicacies.<br /><br />It began with re-enjoying a gem of library music, Joel Vandroogenbroeck's gorgeous <span style="font-style: italic;">Computer Blossoms </span>album from 1981. Now, I'm at most a super-casual dabbler in the wide and largely hidden world of library music, the pursuit of which seems to claim many lives (or at least intelligences). It is almost absurd to be <span style="font-style: italic;">a bit</span> interested in library music, like I am: it's the kind of thing that only makes any sense if you're going to become properly unhinged. (Perhaps I will, before long: I certainly seem to be running out of things to get really excited about in more mainstream arenas, other than trying to keep up with whatever's new.)<br /><br />At any rate, I thought I would see if I could find any other of Vandroogenbroeck's recordings kicking about. First to fall into my clutches were a brace of albums, <span style="font-style: italic;">Meditations vol. 1 </span>and <span style="font-style: italic;">vol. 2</span>, from 1979 or 1980. Now, if I list the titles of the four tracks on vol. 2, I think you'll probably have a clue about what generic area we're in: they are, respectively: "Contemplation", "Gongs", "Meditative Contemplation" and "Meditation". So, no, these are not the fruits of Vandroogenbroeck's controversial psychobilly phase. (Which, to be honest, he has yet to have, at the time of writing.)<br /><br />Now if there's a zone of popular music that holds little appeal for me, it's this neck of the woods. Nothing (much) against meditation <span style="font-style: italic;">per se</span>, or against the idea that music might be a useful component of a meditative practice, but most music made specifically <span style="font-style: italic;">for</span> meditative ends has always defeated me -- or perhaps I should say I've failed it: it's so inert, and its many cliches are so risible (and inevitably so underexamined by its blissed-out proponents), that the whole enterprise generally reduces me to a seething lava of appalled fury, which is by any standards contrary to the spirit of the exercise.<br /><br />These two Vandroogenbroeck albums, however, are not at all bad, as it goes. Crucially, he still sounds like an accomplished musician with a reliable compositional sense, rather than someone who just happens to have drifted off to sleep with a flute stuck up his nose. (Wow, that must surely be the squarest sentence I've ever written in these pages. Jeez, chill those hostility beans, Gran'pa Thompson!) And so the two volumes of <span style="font-style: italic;">Meditations</span> were my brow-cooling soundtrack as I continued to rummage through the Inconceivably Enormous Virtual Charity Shop record bin for further Vandroogenbroeck nuggets. Before long I'd got my feverish e-mitts on <span style="font-style: italic;">Cottonwoodhill</span>, the seminal (if you ask the right people) debut album by Brainticket, the psychedelic rock outfit with whom Vandroogenbroeck first came to (those same) people's attention at the beginning of the 70s.<br /><br />Now, OK, so, if there's a zone of popular music that holds even less appeal for me than meditational wibble-outs, it's psychedelic blah-fests. I mean I'm not uninterested in the whole topic of altered states of consciousness, in terms of brain chemistry and so on, but only in a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hd4rgyZzseY">teddibly teddibly Christopher Mayhew</a> sort of way (not that I've ever tried mescaline). But a chorus line of semolina pilchards cavorting in front of a melting paisley backdrop, <span style="font-style: italic;">et cetera</span>, has always seemed to me a much less interesting cabaret act to sit and be entranced by than, say, an actual person actually doing almost anything (except juggling). I don't mean to say I have any moral objection to drug use, but I do object on more-or-less moral grounds to people being boring or self-regarding, and most manifestations of psychonautic culture seem to me to rank with being told people's dreams or shown their holiday snaps, incredibly slowly and with too much reverb; as advertisements for ego death go, in all the excitement these self-obsessed chumps seem to have forgotten to switch on their irony sensors. ...Oh boy, don't I sound like a big slab of condensed laughs. I'm going to stop talking about this now. Perhaps my perspective is too coloured by my own experience of paranoid delusions in my 20's, before being put on lithium for a while; some of that stuff was pretty wacky, but, ultimately, in the most painful and frightening and energy-sapping way. It's great when you're straight, yeah.<br /><br />Anyway, <span style="font-style: italic;">Cottonwoodhill</span> turns out, despite all that (and Lord knows it's hardly blameless in respect of the above objections), to be rather an exciting record, and these four Vandroogenbroeck albums taken together started to remind me of other music that I like -- or liked as a teenager and hadn't heard since, but have consequently tracked down over the past few days -- that rather complicates the story I've got used to telling myself about how little I'm at home to acid bores and space cadets.<br /><br />And so gradually this nearly-themed giant mixtape (were it <span style="font-style: italic;">actually</span> a mixtape it would have to be a C140, so be warned!) came together like a slowly emerging mind-map, where one thing would remind me of the next, but the collection as a whole has ended up covering quite a multitude of sins, and I really like how it's turned out.<br /><br />The only constraint I gave myself was to avoid coming too close to the present day -- hence, for instance, no Gorky's Zygotic Mynci and definitely no Black Moth Super Rainbow, both of whom I might otherwise have included. The period covered is therefore, essentially, 1967-1985 (skewed towards the very late 60s / early 70s), with a single anomaly at either end: a Structures Sonores Lasry-Baschet piece which surprised me by dating back to 1962, and a Morphogenesis track from 1989. I should clarify that though there's much here that you might loosely call trippy, or which sounds to some degree redolent of pharmaceutical shenanigans, this is not about identifying a strain or lineage that necessarily has anything to do with drugs -- or, for that matter, meditation, contemplation, gongs, spiritual adventure, or any other route to getting poked in the third eye. It's just a bunch of fun stuff -- proggy pop, psych folk, library fancy-goods, free jazz (and expensive jazz too for that matter), nostalgia trips, Anglo-Dadaist irruptions, eccentrica (wasn't that the new name for the Post Office for a while?), neglected B-sides and general bric-a-brac, familiar and less-so, which, if I've done what I think I've done, will hopefully contain very slightly more that you really like than stuff you really hate.<br /><br />Tracklist follows with little commentary notes: I'll try not to ramble, I promise.<br /><br />Btw, the Bonzo Dog Band track "Music for the Head Ballet", from which I borrow the title of this post, is not included, but just in case you've never made its acquaintance:<br /><br /><br /><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/RBcnbxOD-Ds?rel=0" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="349" width="425"></iframe><br /><br /><br /><br />* * *<br /><br /><br /><embed src="http://www.box.net//static/flash/box_explorer.swf?widget_hash=nryx3ox0n7nhntod00dc&amp;v=1&amp;cl=0&amp;s=0" wmode="transparent" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" height="345" width="460"></embed><br /><br /><br />Track listing:<br /><br /><br />1 <span style="font-weight: bold;">Golden Avatar: </span>'You're Not That Body' from <span style="font-style: italic;">A Change of Heart </span>(1976)<br />I picked up my copy of <span style="font-style: italic;">A Change of Heart </span>(which looks like <a href="http://www.progarchives.com/album.asp?id=10976">this</a>) at a school jumble sale in about 1986, when, I'm now gobsmacked to realise, the album would have been just ten years old -- in other words, as recent as, say, Radiohead's <span style="font-style: italic;">Amnesiac</span> is to us in 2011. Its groovy Krishna-conscious wig-outs sounded like something from an entirely vanished era. On the other hand, it hardly seems to have dated <span style="font-style: italic;">since</span> I first played it, and I still find the restlessness of this track quite exciting.<br /><br />2 <span style="font-weight: bold;">The New Regency Players: </span>'High Life' (1978?)<br />A fun bit of library music, cribbing a bit I suppose from Thijs van Leer, flautist with Focus. (You'll know <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xK2xQBsOvrY">this tune</a> of theirs, but, man, have you ever seen <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xK2xQBsOvrY">the video</a>?) Persons in their late 30s or so may recognize 'High Life' from the Schools programme <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlBAob3nAME"><span style="font-style: italic;">Stop, Look &amp; Listen</span></a>. Others (not me) may instead know it from the popular 1981, <span style="font-style: italic;">ahem</span>, arthouse movie <span style="font-style: italic;">Ta' mej doktorn </span>(a.k.a. <span style="font-style: italic;">Swedish Sex Clinic</span>), in which, according to IMDb, Marie Laffont played "Crazy Gilda" and Chris Regan portrayed the debonair "Xavier de Bergerac". (I guessed about the 'debonair' part.)<br /><br />3 <span style="font-weight: bold;">Gong: </span>'I Never Glid Before' from <span style="font-style: italic;">Angel's Egg </span>(1973)<br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Angel's Egg</span> is pretty much the only Gong album I can really stomach, mostly because the playing is so tight and it has a nice irrepressible good-natured burbling quality. Also, the hooks are terrific, as on this track written and propelled by good (if not angelic) egg Steve Hillage.<br /><br />4 <span style="font-weight: bold;">Donovan: </span>'There Is A Mountain' from <span style="font-style: italic;">Donovan's Greatest Hits </span>(1969)<br />My favourite Donovan song, with the possible exception of the utterly unsupportable <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCpnwJQhoYY">"The Intergalactic Laxative"</a>.<br /><br />5 <span style="font-weight: bold;">Brainticket: </span>'Places of Light' from <span style="font-style: italic;">Cottonwoodhill </span>(1971)<br />Probably the most vanilla track from a pretty out-there album: but, as ever with the estimable Joel Vandroogenbroeck in the room, even the loosest and most mind-garblingly freeky tracks feel like they stay somewhat anchored in a place of thoughtful musicianship.<br /><br />6 <span style="font-weight: bold;">Univeria Zekt: </span>'Something's Cast A Spell' from <span style="font-style: italic;">The Unnamables </span>(1972)<br />So here's an album with a (fairly boring) story attached, of which I had no idea when I picked my copy up for about a fiver in the bookshop at the Arnolfini, back in the day (1990 or so) when they still sold vinyl in there. It took me several years -- in fact, essentially, it took me until the point when the world wide web started getting busy -- to discover its provenance. It turns out Univeria Zekt are basically the French prog scamps Magma in disguise. I suppose I must have happened upon the 1986 reissue of <span style="font-style: italic;">The Unnamables </span>(it didn't help my research that I'd always assumed The Unnamables was the name of the band) -- I guess I must still have it in a box somewhere but please don't make me go looking for it -- but even so, at the time that I picked it up, my copy was probably worth £40 at least, until I went and spoiled it all by doing somethin' stupid like playing it. I'm glad I played it though, all the same: it has a kind of reckless blustering energy in its high points which I rather admire.<br /><br />7 <span style="font-weight: bold;">White Noise: </span>'Love Without Sound' from <span style="font-style: italic;">An Electric Storm </span>(1968)<br />A record that was once a well-kept secret among Radiophonic cultists but is now routinely acknowledged as a really significant album, <span style="font-style: italic;">An Electric Storm</span> is a collaboration between Delia Darbyshire and Brian Hodgson of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and American musician and engineer David Vorhaus, who continues to record and tour under the White Noise name. The two extended high-drama tracks on (what would have been) Side Two tend to be hailed as the highlights, but being a girly lightweight I'm rather fonder of the cheerful concrete pop on Side One, of which this song is a particularly likeable example.<br /><br />8 <span style="font-weight: bold;">Gestalt et Jive: </span>'Wieviele Engel' from <span style="font-style: italic;">Nouvelle Cuisine </span>(1985)<br />Gestalt et Jive was an experimental jazz-rock project initiated by the brilliant, (shall we say) mercurial reedist Alfred 23 Harth (yup, that's his name -- <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foUSlUe_zlM">paging Jim Carrey</a>) alongside such luminaries as Steve Beresford (see below) and Anton Fier. <span style="font-style: italic;">Nouvelle Cuisine</span>, much of which sounds like a standard jazz chamber group trying to soundtrack its own dismemberment by hatchet-wielding psychopathic clowns, is one of my out-and-out favourite records of all time; if on the strength of this track you can remotely see why -- well, look, do you want to get married?<br /><br />9<span style="font-weight: bold;"> Peter Blegvad: </span>'Alcohol' (1974)<br />This queasy lickle ditty was recorded in '74 for the Slapp Happy / Henry Cow collaboration <span style="font-style: italic;">Desperate Straights</span>, but not released until 1981 when it came out as a one-sided 7". Those local pals o' mine who blithely dismiss Blegvad on the strength of his more recent, admittedly relatively easy-listening singer-songwriter material, might care to shove this song up their, frankly, arses.<br /><br />10 <span style="font-weight: bold;">The Keith Tippett Group: </span>'This Is What Happens' from <span style="font-style: italic;">Dedicated To You But You Weren't Listening </span>(1971)<br />The first experimental jazz I ever heard live, at Bristol Old Vic in about 1988, was pianist Keith Tippett, and ever since, I have been a little bit scared of sideburns. He's a remarkable musician though and not acknowledged widely or energetically enough as a pioneer of genuinely worthwhile crossover projects in the interzones between rock, jazz and free improvised music. This album is from the more "accessible" jazz-rock end of the axis, with a stonking (and heavily Soft Machine-inflected) band line-up including Robert Wyatt on drums and Elton Dean on saxes.<br /><br />11 <span style="font-weight: bold;">The Scaffold: </span>'Buttons Of Your Mind' (1968)<br />A curious supergroup, The Scaffold: poet Roger McGough, comedian John Gorman (later of <span style="font-style: italic;">Tiswas</span>), and Paul McCartney's brother Mike McGear. This delicately melancholic track was the B-side of their #1 smash (etc.) 'Lily the Pink' (though if we're going to talk about their chart hits I always rather preferred <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjnkmNyArNg">this one</a>).<br /><br />12 <span style="font-weight: bold;">Michael Mantler: </span>'Sometimes I See People' from <span style="font-style: italic;">Silence </span>(1977)<br />If you've never heard this album, boy you're in for a treat. This is Harold Pinter's play <span style="font-style: italic;">Silence</span> reimagined as a prog-jazz odyssey -- I mean <span style="font-style: italic;">literally</span> that's what it is. In their review, <span style="font-style: italic;">Melody Maker</span> called it "possibly the least listenable record I have ever heard", which may initially seem harsh. But guitarist Chris Spedding acquits himself well and the singers are top drawer: Kevin Coyne, Robert Wyatt and Carla Bley. Don't give up on it until you've heard the deathless final exchange of this section: Bley: "Does it get darker the higher you get?" Coyne: "No." Bathos you could eat your dinner off. I have a feeling that having known this record since sixth-form days may be the reason that <span style="font-style: italic;">Silence</span> is possibly the only Pinter play that I really don't like at all.<br /><br />13 <span style="font-weight: bold;">Shirley &amp; Dolly Collins: </span>'God Dog' from <span style="font-style: italic;">Anthems in Eden </span>(1969)<br />Sometimes it's the tooth-and-claw tradition that sounds strangest: not least, in this instance, because 'God Dog' is written by the great Robin Williamson of the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWJO_pfyOho">Incredible String Band</a>.<br /><br />14 <span style="font-weight: bold;">Rufus Harley: </span>'Sufur' from <span style="font-style: italic;">Scotch And Soul </span>(1967)<br />A Thompson's favourite (of mine, at least; possibly not of yours), Harley was, if not the only, then certainly the most prominent exponent of Scottish bagpipes in a jazz context. I like him partly because you can always see what he's getting at, even if he's not always able to transcend the modal and tonal constraints of his chosen horn (though that usually ends up being a problem for his backing bands rather than Harley himself). You can hear him on Laurie Anderson's <span style="font-style: italic;">Big Science </span>album, too, and, to his great credit and as a mark of his distinction, he doesn't really seem to fit in there either.<br /><br />15 <span style="font-weight: bold;">Steve Beresford: </span>'The Bath of Surprise' from <span style="font-style: italic;">The Bath of Surprise </span>(1977)<br />Here's the great Steve Beresford, coming to you live from the bath in his flat. Beresford is one of the British experimental scene's most enduring and controversial figures, whose playfulness has always irked the hairier-shirted factions of that demi-monde. But those who don't care for such territories have probably heard Beresford's work nonetheless -- he ended up as Vic Reeves's musical director in the 90s, for example, and... -- so, you know the little bit of music that pops into your head when you think about Derren Brown's Channel 4 shows, that espionagey little riff? That's Steve too. Last seen (through these eyeholes, at any rate) in Bexhill-on-Sea, studiously dicking about in the company of Stewart Lee and Tania Chen on one of their recent performances of John Cage's <span style="font-style: italic;">Indeterminacy</span>.<br /><br />16 <span style="font-weight: bold;">David Bedford: </span>'Some Bright Stars for Queens College' from <span style="font-style: italic;">Nurses Song With Elephants </span>(1972)<br />Gotta love David Bedford, especially this album from early in his career. <span style="font-style: italic;">Nurses Song...</span> was released on John Peel's label, Dandelion, and if you listen carefully you can hear Peel himself twirling one of the twirly things that make the twirly sound on this track. (You can't, probably, tell it's Peel, to be honest.) Things David Bedford has done: collaborate with Mike Oldfield and Roy Harper; write a big fun recorder concerto; compose a choral piece requiring the performers to inhale helium in order to hit the high notes. Things he has not done: hold the world record for the 10,000m; get cross about the 118 118 adverts. (That was <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2004/jan/27/newmedia.advertising">a different David Bedford</a>.)<br /><br />17 <span style="font-weight: bold;">Vernon Elliott / Oliver Postgate: </span>'Dialogue from Episode 1' from <span style="font-style: italic;">The Clangers </span>(1969)<br />No actual Clangers to be heard on this recording, but Elliott's incidental music for this and some of Postgate's other classic children's series such as <span style="font-style: italic;">Ivor the Engine</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">Pogle's Wood</span> is a treat to hear in its own right.<br /><br />18 <span style="font-weight: bold;">The Free Design: </span>'Bubbles' from <span style="font-style: italic;">...Sing For Very Important People </span>(1970)<br />To be filed somewhere between Harpers Bizarre and Singers Unlimited (whom they slightly predate), the Free Design could hardly sound more of their time. You might recognize their song "Love You", which was used for a TV car ad a couple of years ago (it's <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGAWSCb8GhU">here</a> if you're feeling the lack of the words OH FUCK OFF emblazoned in block caps across the inside of your brain)<span style="font-style: italic;"></span>.<br /><br />19 <span style="font-weight: bold;">Kipper Kids: </span>'The Sheik of Araby' (1983)<br />The Kipper Kids were a performance art duo who broke through to a surprising degree of mainstream media visibility in the 70s and early 80s with their oddly British music hall take on Actionism slash Paul McCarthy slash Punch and Judy slash <span style="font-style: italic;">Jeux Sans Frontieres</span>. (Evidences <a href="http://www.kipperkids.com/">here</a>, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vJfDOOPCw8">here</a> and <a href="http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/exhibition/28">here</a>.) Actually the weirdest thing about them probably is that one of them, Martin von Haselberg, ended up married to Bette Midler.<br /><br />20 <span style="font-weight: bold;">Structures Sonores Lasry-Baschet: </span>'Toccata Toccarde' from <span style="font-style: italic;">Mister Blues </span>(1962)<br />Weirdly enough, given the two very different sound-worlds, there's a Univeria Zekt link here: among the Lasry family, performing here on glass and metal sound sculptures designed and built by the Baschet brothers, is a young Teddy Lasry, who a decade later would be one of the key members of Magma. If you recognise the tonal quality of the sound of the Structures Sonores but can't place where you've heard it before, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GD7NKTMk10w">this might help...<br /></a><br />21 <span style="font-weight: bold;">John Barry: </span>'Florida Fantasy' from <span style="font-style: italic;">Midnight Cowboy OST </span>(1969)<br />You remember <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrxcsnkQkUs">this bit</a> of <span style="font-style: italic;">Midnight Cowboy</span>, right? Ah, what a film. In my last year at university my next door neighbour, on whom I had a little bit of a crush, used to sing persistently, to this tune, a set of lyrics that are still seared on my memory: "At least you've got your bum-bag / At least you've got your bum-bag / At least you've got your bum-bag / ...To put your stuff in." Ah, long-lost carefree days of sexual disorientation and self-harm! How I miss you! Well, at least it stops me associating the tune principally with Su Ingle and <a href="http://www.tvcream.co.uk/?p=2151"><span style="font-style: italic;">Wildtrack</span></a>.<br /><br />22 <span style="font-weight: bold;">Sebastian: </span>'Forglem Mig Ej' from the soundtrack to <span style="font-style: italic;">Du Er Ikke Alene </span>(1978)<br />Oh good -- at last I have something properly obscure to bring to the party. In a way this late 70s piece feels more removed in time and space than anything else in the mix, in that it's part of the soundtrack to an utterly lovely film from Denmark, <span style="font-style: italic;">Du Er Ikke Alene </span>(<span style="font-style: italic;">You Are Not Alone</span>), which narrates a story, set against a suggestive backdrop of social and political upheaval at a progressive boarding school for boys, of a young pupil falling in love with the headmaster's (even younger) son -- a relationship that, astonishingly, is allowed to play out mostly positively and end on a blissfully happy note. It's a film that it's almost impossible to imagine being made now, not least because it has such profound things to say, or to suggest, about education and pedagogy. See it if you can. (You too, Michael Gove, you wretched, hateful, cowardly fraction of a man.) I can't quite tell if the soundtrack stands up on its own, but for me this track is wonderfully reverberant.<br /><br />23 <span style="font-weight: bold;">Sun Ra Arkestra: </span>'Disco 3000' (1979)<br />Impossible to imagine a playlist like this without a bit of Sun Ra. This is from the terrific collection of singles that Evidence brought out in the mid 90s: every home should have one.<br /><br />24 <span style="font-weight: bold;">Pigsty Hill Light Orchestra: </span>'Cushion Foot Stomp' from <span style="font-style: italic;">Pigsty Hill Light Orchestra Presents... </span>(1970)<br />Bought, weirdly, I now realise, at the same school jumble sale at which I picked up the Golden Avatar album. PHLO were a local outfit who turn up in the footnotes of historic accounts of British folk-rock (which they manifestly aren't, <span style="font-style: italic;">quite</span>) by being the first group to record for the label Village Thing, who went on to release important albums by figures such as Wizz Jones and the great <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ief-gzFdvYw">Steve Tilston</a>. For about a month of my teenage life, all I wanted to do was be in a band like Pigsty Hill Light Orchestra.<br /><br />25 <span style="font-weight: bold;">Ron Geesin: </span>'Twisted Pair'<span style="font-style: italic;"> </span>(1982)<br />If you don't know Ron Geesin's work -- and if all you know is his <span style="font-style: italic;">Music from 'The Body' </span>collaboration with Roger Waters then you haven't even really scratched the surface -- then great joys await. 'Twisted Pair', included on the helpful 1994 Cherry Red compilation <span style="font-style: italic;">Hystery</span>, arises out of one of Geesin's most interesting areas of activity in the 70s and 80s: title music for educational programmes. If you ever watched an animation-heavy schools maths programme on ITV during those years -- fronted probably by <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ua0jaWrx29s">Fred Harris</a> or Max Mason (where are you now, Max?) -- chances are it had music by Ron Geesin: you can tell his signature sense of harmony and wonky rhythm in a matter of seconds, which is the mark of a great composer when he only has seconds to work with.<br /><br />26 <span style="font-weight: bold;">Billy Bang: </span>'Ebony Minstrel Man' from <span style="font-style: italic;">Rainbow Gladiator </span>(1981)<br />Oh how I loved Billy Bang, the great jazz violinst, who died in April this year. To those for whom jazz violin means the sweetly decorative flights of Stephane Grappelli, Bang can be a bit of a shock: much more in the lineage of the altogether more robust <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvR4RvAQHqM">Stuff Smith</a>, and influenced somewhat by his early experiences playing with Sun Ra, Bang's tone can be sour, pedantic, sharp and sometimes downright fugly, particularly if your ear is allergic to microtonality: but also robust, exuberant and capable of great lyricism. <span style="font-style: italic;">Rainbow Gladiator</span> was my first brush with Bang and I can recommend it as an entry point for the curious.<br /><br />27 <span style="font-weight: bold;">Konkrete Canticle: </span>'Ga(il s)o(ng)' from <span style="font-style: italic;">Experiments in Disintegrating Language / Konkrete Canticle </span>(1971)<br />Konkrete Canticle were basically the Peter, Paul and Mary of British sound poetry: Bob Cobbing, Michael Chant and Paula Claire (who recently became unexpectedly visible in "the media" last year when she briefly put herself forward as a candidate to be Oxford professor of poetry, before withdrawing in protest at the favouritism that she felt -- surely correctly -- was being extended to Geoffrey Hill, who of course was eventually awarded the post). How about this: <span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"></span></span>Experiments in Disintegrating Language / Konkrete Canticle</span> was issued by the (then) Arts Council of Great Britain on its own record label -- though I've never come across anything else it released -- does anyone know anything about this? <a href="mailto:thompsons_hq@graffiti.net">Please get in touch if you do.<br /></a><br />28 <span style="font-weight: bold;">BBC Radiophonic Workshop: </span>'June' from <span style="font-style: italic;">The Seasons </span>(1969)<br />Essentially, the work of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop falls into two distinct periods: (a) 1958-1972: Scary shit that sounds like John Wyndham's worst dreams; (b) 1972 onwards: "<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=or8N2v7pR8I#t=5m26s">Oh fuck it's Roger Limb</a>". (Actually I heretically quite like Roger Limb's stuff, but there's no doubt the complexion of the Workshop's output changed considerably once the likes of Limb, Peter Howell and the excellent Paddy Kingsland were doing their hummable doo.) This, as you will hear, is very much from the former period. What's particularly chilling is that this material was aimed at classroom use for drama lessons in primary schools. Yes, imagine: this went inside kids. Rebekah Brooks thou should'st have been living at that hour. (Not really.)<br /><br />29 <span style="font-weight: bold;">Richard Digance: </span>'Dear River Thames' (1974)<br />Those who know Digance mostly from his pretty rotten TV "specials" (hm) in the 80s and his frequent appearances in <span style="font-style: italic;">Countdown</span>'s Dictionary Corner may be unaware of his pedigree as a singer-songwriter in the 70s; this, the B-side to an early single on Transatlantic Records (a fascinating label at the time, home to artists such as Billy Connolly and Ralph McTell but also The Fugs and the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVUakcyLnsw">Portsmouth Sinfonia</a>), captures (what I think is) his appeal at this time -- a plangent, nostalgic (but not conservative) lyricism, a pleasingly unvarnished vocal style that lends an edge of vulnerability, and some respectable guitar chops.<br /><br />30<span style="font-weight: bold;"> Robert Ashley: </span>'She Was A Visitor' (1968)<br />A seminal early work by Ashley, perhaps the most consistently interesting of the radical American composers to start emerging in the early 60s (see also Alvin Lucier, Gordon Mumma...). While a lone speaker repeats the title of the piece, selected chorus leaders pick up individual phonemes from the spoken phrase, isolate and sound these, and these are then transmitted (as if by "rumour", according to Ashley's own notes) to different groups within the chorus. It remains a hauntingly effective miniature.<br /><br />31 <span style="font-weight: bold;">Vivian Stanshall &amp; the Sean Head Showband: </span>'Paper Round' (1970)<br />Stanshall should hardly need any introduction; the Sean Head Showband was I think his first group post-Bonzo's, and this marvellous track, if I remember correctly, is the B-side to "Labio-Dental Fricative", which turns up on the Bonzo <span style="font-style: italic;">Cornology</span> set. Somewhere in the madding crowd is Eric Clapton on guitar -- but not, sadly, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DUEAG5eO6c">the Count Basie Orchestra on triangle</a>.<br /><br />32 <span style="font-weight: bold;">Raymond Scott: </span>'Bufferin "Memories"'<span style="font-style: italic;"> </span>(1967)<br />Given the disclaimers in my intro, it seems apt that the most overt drugs reference in this playlist is to over-the-counter analgesics. Raymond Scott was the extraordinary presiding genius of Manhattan Research Inc., a sort of (nearly) one-man radiophonic workshop where electronic and invented instruments were deployed mostly in the service of ear-catching commercial exploitations. After a couple of early collaborations with Jim Henson (god of the Muppets &amp; plenty more) on experimental short films such as <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtxkgrKWkd4">"Ripples"</a> and <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GN23Q4wgJ6w">"Limbo: the Organized Mind</a><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GN23Q4wgJ6w">"</a>, Scott and Henson recorded, in similar vein, this tv advert for Bufferin painkillers.<br /><br />33 <span style="font-weight: bold;">Maggie Henderson: </span>'Butterflies' from <span style="font-style: italic;">Ragtime </span>(1974)<br />Any excuse to throw in a song from <a href="http://www.jedisparadise.co.uk/3/Ragtime.htm"><span style="font-style: italic;">Ragtime</span></a>. Those who saw Maggie as Beth in my production of <span style="font-style: italic;">Landscape</span> earlier this year will particularly cherish this track, I'm thinking.<br /><br />34 <span style="font-weight: bold;">Terry Riley: </span>'Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band' (extract; 1968)<br />Just an eight-minute excerpt from Riley's seminal improvised work for saxophone, organ and tape delay (or Time Lag Accumulator to give it its proper sci-fi name). A bit like staring at a complicated rug. Forever.<br /><br />35 <span style="font-weight: bold;">Ric Sanders: </span>'Improvisation on Constant Billy' from <span style="font-style: italic;">Whenever </span>(1984)<br />To be honest I'm not absolutely sure what this is doing here, except that it came to mind and I like it a lot. This is (as far as I can tell) the only digitally available track from <span style="font-style: italic;">Whenever</span>, which deserves a reissue in its entirety: in the meantime this multitracked improvisation pops up on the recent compilation <span style="font-style: italic;">Still Waters</span>. Sanders is probably best known as violinist by appointment to Fairport Convention (oops, just had to correct that, nearly lent him to Fairground Attraction by mistake; think fatigue is starting to set in...)<br /><br />36 <span style="font-weight: bold;">Big Star: </span>'The Ballad of El Goodo' from <span style="font-style: italic;">#1 Record </span>(1972)<br />The original version of a song that I imagine a fair few Thompson's readers will know better from the wonderful Evan Dando cover version on the soundtrack to <span style="font-style: italic;">Empire Records</span>, the <span style="font-style: italic;">Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives</span> of American teen comedy ensemble movies.<br /><br />37 <span style="font-weight: bold;">Gyorgy Ligeti: </span>'Hungarian Rock'<span style="font-style: italic;"> </span>(1978)<br />I only came across this wonktastic bit of Ligeti last year when I needed to throw something complicated into the mix for my nano-<span style="font-style: italic;">gesamtkunstwerk</span> <a href="http://beescope.blogspot.com/2011/04/kenilworth-castle-760-sham-wedding.html">'Kenilworth Castle, £7.60'</a>. In that instance I used Elisabeth Chojnacka's excellent recording for cembalo, but here's Pierre Charial on barrel organ and let that be a lesson to you.<br /><br />38 <span style="font-weight: bold;">Morphogenesis: </span>'Lamination no. 9' from <span style="font-style: italic;">Prochronisms </span>(1989)<br />To say that Morphogenesis are underrated is not to say that they're not highly esteemed, which they are; but actually I think they're about as good as it gets, at least in the field of materialist electroacoustic improvisation. They started out in the mid-80s and I'm pleased to see they persist, though personally I haven't run in to them live since the tragic death of Roger Sutherland in 2004. Here's a track from their first LP; later recorded works are stronger, certainly, but their speculative group intelligence is already coming through amply by this point. One of the Morphs is Adam Bohman, who may be familiar to some Thompson's readers from his duo with performer Patrizia Paolini (for which I was matchmaker, actually -- long story), or his curatorial endeavours at BAC over the years. Oh and <a href="http://www.stewartlee.co.uk/press/writtenformoney/morphogenesis-epiphanies.htm">over here</a> you can read something nice by Stewart Lee about seeing Morphogenesis for the first time.<br /><br />39<span style="font-weight: bold;"> Joel Vandroogenbroeck: </span>'Cycle' from <span style="font-style: italic;">Computer Blossoms </span>(1981)<br />Here's where this whole little expedition began. Listening to it again I've just remembered that I meant to include among these tracks Alvin Curran's 'On My Satin Harp' from <span style="font-style: italic;">Songs And Views of the Magnetic Garden</span>. But I have to be careful not to allow this to become some Borgesian mixtape that increases its size exponentially and paradoxically and ultimately includes every possible permutation and iteration of itself. Why? Because sometimes, worse luck, they make me leave the house.<br /><br />40 <span style="font-weight: bold;">Paul Giovanni &amp; Magnet: </span>'Willow's Song' from <span style="font-style: italic;">The Wicker Man OST </span>(1973)<br />Well so in the context this is a bit like finishing with "Land of Hope and Glory". Not terribly surprising for anyone that it's here, but we can all join in, and if it wasn't here you'd feel cheated. The movie sequence is <a href="http://www.videohippy.com/video/138046/The-Wicker-Man--Willows-Song-unedited-and-redubbed">here</a> if you want to watch along, in which case you may also need one of <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Cooler-Multi-Function-Personal-Mini/dp/B000P9CM20">these</a>. And <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peug224n77E">here's the Sneaker Pimps' version</a> for the sheer life-ventilating heck of it.<br /><br />And now, at unimaginably long last, you're free to go. Call people, let them know you're OK. Lots of love xx<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">The usual gentlemanly Thompson's disclaimer is cordially invoked: if you own the copyright in any of the above tracks, and you'd prefer it wasn't included in this collation, please don't hesitate to contact the Controlling Thompson, who will undertake to vanish it with all alacrity, probably in the middle of the night while the world is sleeping, and replace it with his own </span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" >a cappella </span><span style="font-size:85%;">rendering of the entirety of </span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" >Metal Machine Music.</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> I'm just saying.</span>Chris Goodehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17993698000314709291noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28051672.post-36482271528554276152011-06-18T23:22:00.002+01:002011-06-18T23:45:14.642+01:00I'll try to write about <span style="font-style: italic;">Open House</span> in the next few days: I may as well say now, briefly, that it felt like one of the most important and deeply suggestive projects I've been involved in (and one of the most nourishingly pleasurable, too, for the most part, tending frequently towards joyous): but I'm also feeling really exhausted today after such an intense week, and found myself wanting to create a space of silence and invisibility to inhabit as an individual this evening as a reaction to the gregariousness and the emotional exposure of the past few days -- which is why, taking myself rather by surprise, I've ended up not going to the 'Paths Through Utopias' screening at the close of Two Degrees this evening. Apologies to everyone who I'd promised to see and say hello to there. I really wanted to be there but, at the crucial time, I wanted to be here, or to not be anywhere, slightly more. I'll look forward to hearing about it.<br /><br />In the meantime, two things to draw your attention to quickly:<br /><br />One, a really lovely <a href="http://statesofdeliquescence.blogspot.com/2011/06/come-on-chemicals.html">blog post</a> from Maddy Costa, sort of pendant to but also separate from last week's Guardian featurette, on the time she's spent with CG&amp;Co over the past few weeks.<br /><br />The other: a new and last-minute addition to the roster of events at the right of the page. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cris_Cheek">cris cheek</a>'s doing a talk at Birkbeck on Monday evening, with the toothsome title: "Before I am Anything Else: provisional transatlantic communities in polyvocal poetic performance"; that talk is then being followed by a programme of performances of polyvocal poems, scores etc., at which I'll be performing along with cris, Lawrence Upton, Holly Pester and others. I think it could be really interesting and I'm sorry about the short notice (regrettably the academic world customarily operates on the basis of an entirely different -- and, to some outsiders including myself, baffling -- calibration when it comes to lead times). Excitingly, I'm also interviewing cris for this blog tomorrow afternoon, so watch this space, I'll get it all written up as fast as I can.<br /><br />Poetry-wise you might also like to note that I'm reading with Jonny Liron and Tamarin Norwood at the Other Room in Manchester next month; and I think I can also now tentatively announce a London launch reading for <span style="font-style: italic;">Better Than Language</span>, a new anthology of work by younger poets, which I've edited and am about to publish through my Ganzfeld imprint, on the evening of Thursday 28th July. There'll be a Brighton launch too, early in August.<br /><br />More soon; enough for now. xxChris Goodehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17993698000314709291noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28051672.post-31551091163122133772011-06-11T23:07:00.007+01:002011-06-12T01:12:47.744+01:00Opening the house<div></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Lhtl3cf4CTU/TfPnfxT7O8I/AAAAAAAACpY/MC9NAAR_rfM/s1600/portrait%2Bon%2Bportrait%2Bii%2Bsmall.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 214px; height: 320px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Lhtl3cf4CTU/TfPnfxT7O8I/AAAAAAAACpY/MC9NAAR_rfM/s320/portrait%2Bon%2Bportrait%2Bii%2Bsmall.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5617087693260012482" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:78%;">Clive Mendus (top), Jamie Wood (bottom) in rehearsal at CPT last month.</span><br /><span style="font-size:78%;">Photo: Malcolm Phillips</span><br /></div><br /><br /><div></div>The best work I do is in rehearsal rooms.<br /><br />Here we are, two-thirds of the way through the inadvertent but hugely satisfying trilogy of back-to-back ensemble processes that are making this spring such a pleasure. Tomorrow I get on a train to Leeds to spend the week in <span style="font-style: italic;">Open House</span> at WYP. I don't think I've ever known so little about a project that's about to loom pretty large: we'll be immersed in it twelve hours a day (at least) and I feel like I might just about be able to predict, though with not much certainty, how it goes for the first half hour. Maybe 45 minutes. After that: there's just no way of knowing.<br /><br />I explained <span style="font-style: italic;">Open House</span> in my previous post (and of course you can read about it on the <a href="http://www.wyp.org.uk/transform/OpenHouse.asp">WYP web site</a>) so I won't talk you through the ins and outs again, but for a bit more context you might want to have a look at <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2011/jun/07/open-house-christopher-goode?INTCMP=SRCH">this lovely piece</a> by Maddy Costa, whom I invited a few weeks ago to come along for the ride through these three wildly different landscapes. (Though for my part I might <span style="font-style: italic;">not</span> want you to have a look at the accompanying photograph -- I mean good grief I know I'm not an oil painting at the best of times but, wow, nothing prepared me for the bracing thwack of humiliation that went along with that little doozy.) Apparently the Radio 4 <span style="font-style: italic;">Today</span> programme might come and sit with us at some point in the week: which is, er, a peculiar thought, but not a completely unappealing one.<br /><br />Is <span style="font-style: italic;">Open House</span> really newsworthy? We're so accustomed to thinking of what we do as something that carries so little weight in the broader culture (let alone in the ADHD cacophony of broadcast media) that it's almost impossible to conceive of it registering at all, let alone conveying any of the force and impetus that, at its best, it has for us on the inside. But thinking about the proposition that <span style="font-style: italic;">Open House</span> makes -- to its audiences, to WYP, to other artists, to those who hear about it at whatever remove -- there's something very interesting in allowing oneself to reimagine it, albeit in an obviously ludicrous and self-indulgent daydream, as news.<br /><br />The trouble is, the headline doesn't sound like it's earning its keep. "The best work I do is in rehearsal rooms." Why should that matter to anybody? -- So here is the news, in case anyone puts a mic in front of my face at some point in the next week and asks me what we're up to.<br /><br />The best work I do is in rehearsal rooms. I'm very proud of the shows and pieces I make but I wish more and more that audiences could see inside the rehearsal room. That's where theatre is most like itself: a liquid thing, restless, full of spontaneities and unexpected shifts. The room I like being in is calm and careful but alive with attentiveness, with smart people trying to speak each other's languages, tune in to each other's invitations, respond to each other's desires. Negotiating in a spirit of curious enquiry and the delight that comes from being kind together. At its best it's a room where everybody falls a little bit in love, impelled by the knowledge that in a matter of weeks, days, hours, the time in which that love is immediately possible will end, its space will close down.<br /><br />I loved the room we made together on the Cendrars project. Talking together, reading, dancing, pottering. Lots of pottering. Sketching each other, taking photos, making notes. Watching, watching. Someone taking a little nap after lunch one day while the rest of us watched an old episode of <span style="font-style: italic;">Buck Rogers</span>. That was my favourite. It made me think back to the times I've slept in a rehearsal room. Times I've laid on the floor and laughed till I cried. Times I just cried. Times we all cried together. Times things fell into place after a long period of confusion and doubt. Times of sitting quietly on a window-ledge and looking out over the city. Times of hearing written texts spoken aloud for the first time. Times I've been touched, held, embraced, coaxed, tickled; times I've been able to do those things for other people. Times I've seen shyness: people singing songs without confidence, struggling to express themselves, standing up and trying something that was never going to work and then trying it again. Times of great gifts: seeing old friends in new ways; hearing a piece of music that changes everything; watching people I hardly know taking off their clothes and letting themselves be seen. Times I've been seen myself. Really, really seen. The relief of being really seen, and really heard.<br /><br />Being in a rehearsal room -- as I have the past four weeks, and am about to for another week -- still feels like a treat, though if you laid those special periods of my life end to end they'd stretch for years now I suppose. A rehearsal room that's really working, where the things I've just described are possible, and easily possible, nearly inevitable: that's my favourite place to live. Maybe it's the only place I <span style="font-style: italic;">really</span> live. And sometimes I must admit, though the pieces we make together in those rooms are always suffused with the atmosphere in which they've been made, sometimes I'm aware that when I'm talking about what important and transformative things theatre can do, I'm often not talking about the bit that most people only have access to, the bit that happens for an hour and a half in the evenings. I'm talking about the hopeful and loving way in which we did our best to get there.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Open House</span> is an attempt to invite people in to the work so they can see what it's like, because I think there's such misunderstanding about how we make what we make, and why we make it. I think the thought and the care that go into the making, and not least the making of the room where the making will happen, might surprise some of those people who fulminate below the line on the theatre blogs -- and several of those who get paid to fulminate above the line too. Perhaps they might find their cynicism a little bit dispelled. Their fear, too. Their uninformed trigger-happy assumptions about pretentiousness and self-indulgence.<br /><br />This might be a useful end in itself but it's also a more significant beginning. I want a theatre that behaves more like the best, the most inclusive, the most supportive, rehearsal room, precisely because of what happens there, the things I've described here. Because those instances of very special, very heightened, or very calm but deeply engaged action, happen in a zone with no fictional frame around it. A little slippery liminality, perhaps: but you see people, not characters, you see actors and creative teams, you see real lives being lived, but also being crafted <span style="font-style: italic;">as </span>they are lived, in the moment of their living.<br /><br />I've often described theatre as a place where we figure out how to live together better; I realise for most people, even when they're watching pedagogic political plays or participating in supposedly interactive immersive walkabouts, that would be an almost inexplicable statement, because actually I'm talking about the processes that happen in the best rehearsal, the lives we lead there, where all our commitments are held and honoured but every detail of their activation is open to question and negotiation. Theatre performances that have somehow retained some sense of that promise are pretty rare and they almost never take place in the larger established buildings.<br /><br />I think more and more about theatre as a place to know. We're quite attracted to the opposite: saying that there's something interesting -- and so there is -- in theatre practices and encounters that are about not-knowing, about doubt, about sitting with uncertainty and wondering. <span style="font-style: italic;"></span>Certainly most rehearsal processes have a lot of that going on in them. But sometimes the doubt is so present in our minds that we don't see the knowing. We don't see what an act of knowing it is to come to this space in the first place. Not just for us makers but for an audience too. It's an act of knowing, and of wanting, maybe even of needing. Just as we've become so seduced by the rhetoric of unfocused 'risk' and the well-intended idea of "a safe space to fail" that we've become distracted from the exhilarating prospect of coming together in order to succeed, to succeed brilliantly in getting something done: so likewise we've overemphasized the permission to not know, when actually, sometimes, we <span style="font-style: italic;">know</span>. Audiences too. Sometimes, it's true, we know things that audiences don't know, we have insights to impart, we have skills we can use to make beautiful things happen; but our insights as artists arise not because we're cleverer, smarter, than our audiences, but because we practise giving ourselves space in which those insights can live -- and not only live, but live an examined life.<br /><br />Everybody should have the space to know what they know, to feel what it's like to know it. To feel the fear and the distress that comes with knowing what they know, given the space to really feel it. And everybody should have the space to begin to do something with that knowledge. To begin to move, to change. Everybody needs a place of liquidity, of restlessness and shifting, of speculation and slipperiness; a place in which it's possible -- encouraged! -- to be thoughtful and kind and attentive. A place to do shy singing, to take off your clothes, to have a little nap in the company of strangers who'll make sure you're safe. A place in which we can start to negotiate the next place. Not a secluded, insulated, escapist place, but a temporary shelter. A room without walls. An open house.<br /><br />It's funny: almost everybody, right?, at some point or another in their lives, has written a poem. A teenage 'nobody understands me' poem or a funny little 'roses are red' poem in a Valentine's card or whatever. Almost everybody does a bit of making, whether it's cooking or gardening or knitting or DIY or whatever -- and it's not just target-driven activity, it's not just about needing a cake or a scarf, it's about having something to do that makes you feel like a participant in a wider project of being a civilised and creative individual in a society that overwhelmingly wants you to see yourself only as a consumer. But how many people will ever make a bit of theatre? Lord knows I've done enough gigs in people's kitchens and living rooms to know how possible it is to have a few friends round and tell them a story or show them something familiar that they've never really seen before. I believe more and more resolutely in the civic value of designated theatre buildings but I don't think they should have the monopoly on theatre any more than all the world's fish are in aquariums.<br /><br />I was thinking in a sleepless spell last night about that cliché of <span style="font-style: italic;">carpe diem </span>egging-on: life isn't a rehearsal, you know! Well, no, it isn't, and so we might all plausibly want to make the most of whatever time we have at our disposal. We might want to live in a way that's rich and expansive and detailed and careful and joyous and tender and hopeful and attentive. We might want to live in a way that feels so multitudinous, so teeming with possibility, that it begins to seem almost equal to the enormity and complexity of Life with a capital L. Were that so, we could hardly make a better start than to imagine a life that is, at least, <span style="font-style: italic;">like</span> a rehearsal. Because it's too important to think of it merely as a show with a limited run.<br /><br />In other words, the real problem with <span style="font-style: italic;">Open House</span> is that we only get to be there twelve hours a day.<br /><br />And now back to you in the studio, John.<br /><br />xxChris Goodehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17993698000314709291noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28051672.post-62708018147507083542011-05-28T22:55:00.005+01:002011-05-29T01:51:31.464+01:00Tolstoy in the rear view mirrorWell, this is bad, isn't it. I'm not sure but I think this is now the longest gap in transmission that Thompson's has ever experienced. The reason for which is that this spring is probably the busiest period of work I've ever had; I can hardly remember the last time it felt like there was a spare hour in the day. I think I was promising -- certainly I was intending -- a big post threading together reviews of and reflections on some recent (actually, not so recent any more) cultural intake; so, I started writing that post on May 6th and haven't been back to it since. I have to tell you now [anxious nation huddles closer round radiogram] that, although I still very much want to write that piece, there's next to no chance of it appearing here before the end of June: by which point it will have passed through irrelevance and emerged into the realm of historic interest -- so perhaps there's some consolation in there.<br /><br />It's nice at least to report that though things are frantically busy here and sometimes a shade more than brimful, I'm having fun and keeping my head. Not hard at the moment: I'm working on a project that, though it's difficult, is proving an absolutely gorgeous place to live the greater part of my waking life. Some years ago I picked up a copy of a collection of short pieces by the not terrifically well-known French modernist writer <a href="http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/cendrars.htm">Blaise Cendrars</a>, and was absolutely knocked for sixty by it, and by (nearly) everything by him that I subsequently read. Part of what I was tantalised by was how theatrical some of it was, and then how incredibly not-theatrical some other bits were: or, no, I don't mean not-theatrical, I mean impossible to stage, which is another matter entirely. So over the past few years, having slipped bits of Cendrars into pieces like <span style="font-style: italic;">his horses </span>in 2003 and <span style="font-style: italic;">Mixed Ape</span> in 2006, I've been trying to coax various folks into letting me make a piece based entirely on this extraordinary writer's life and body of work; I did a little R&amp;D at New Greenham Arts shortly before Martin Sutherland left, and pitched something to LIFT just days before Mark Ball arrived there, and nothing further came of it in either case. But now, o now, thanks to the magic touch of my producer, the amazing Ric Watts (in cahoots with whom I have just launched the all-new Chris Goode &amp; Company), Arts Council England have given me a little money with which finally to get down and dirty and hold my feet to the Blaise, or trail a Blaise, or some other weak pun of your choice. (He started it! It's not like it's his real name...)<br /><br />So the past two weeks we've been the guests of the lovely Matt Ball (packing his suitcase even as we speak, after a brilliant tenure) at <a href="http://www.cptheatre.co.uk/">CPT</a>, and this coming week we'll be showing our workings so far to a small invited audience, hopefully containing one or more industry mega-wigs who will want to hurl time and money and Luncheon Vouchers at us and in so doing help us to make the big ambitious impossible project I always wanted this to be. What becomes of us all, I can't predict -- it's very difficult to see quite where a show like this would sit, it's a kind of register of experimental theatre that has more or less vanished from the ecosystem over the past few years -- but what's certain is that doing this work has been a complete pleasure. I've loved the feel of the room, really felt comfortable in its skin. Mostly because of the incredible company. The amazing Mervyn Millar is in there -- it was Merv's current adventures in a particular species of live animation that started the ball properly rolling when I visited him in his teeming makeshift laboratory at Central last summer; so too is the lovely James Lewis, who has built the big <span style="font-style: italic;">Longwave</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">Wound Man and Shirley</span> sets for me in recent years, and designed the version of <span style="font-style: italic;">Kiss of Life</span> that went to Australia, and more recently was my delightful co-pilot on the LWF scratch of <span style="font-style: italic;">Keep Breathing </span>at STK. And then three of my favourite actors in all the world: Gemma Brockis, who I think I haven't worked with since <span style="font-style: italic;">...SISTERS</span>; Jamie Wood, who I haven't worked with <span style="font-style: italic;">(qua </span>actor, anyway) since <span style="font-style: italic;">Longwave</span>, bafflingly; and Clive Mendus, who did <span style="font-style: italic;">Monologue </span>with me, gorgeously, in Bath earlier this year, and with whom it's a delight therefore now to be working on stuff that involves, you know, actually getting up, moving around, those sorts of things that didn't interest Pinter very much but at which Mendus is a Viking, as any fan of his work with Complicite &amp;c. will tell you.<br /><br />The great thing about working on Cendrars is that by simply <span style="font-style: italic;">wanting</span> to draw close to his writing in a theatrical context, patterns of thought arise, and shards of terrible necessity penetrate the unwitting imagination, which simply wouldn't otherwise happen; it's a bit like trying to communicate with aliens. (I'm guessing.) Often you can tell the vital signs of a piece by the list of props and so on that need to be sourced, and that's always been a joyous part of the process for me: whether buying a punnet of 36 frozen mice for <span style="font-style: italic;">The School of Velocity </span>or ordering six thousand jellybabies for <span style="font-style: italic;">Henry and Elizabeth.</span> The props list for the Cendrars piece -- which is named after one of the texts it's drawing from: <span style="font-style: italic;">The End of the World Filmed by the Angel of Notre-Dame </span>-- has so far included broccoli (for cramming inside a balloon, obviously), clockwork teeth, copper sulphate, a bicycle siren, honey, and -- if we can bring ourselves to commit to it -- some or all of a deceased squid. We have spent some time watching the old Buster Crabbe <span style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I61CZ7Uq67o">Buck Rogers</a> </span>serial from the 1930s (fantastic!) and even more time examining parts of Clive under a microscope. All to a trippy-yet-bracing soundscore of <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54DNXjNs40c">Messiaen</a> and, crikey, David Bedford. (The composer, not the litigious moustachioed long-distance runner. Can't help thinking we missed a trick there.) My brain feels like it's been massaged with one of those freaky-deaky head-scratchers that make you think you're being attacked by a <a href="http://www.foundbath.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/louise-bourgeois-spider.jpg">Louise Bourgeois spider</a>. But the expansiveness has been so exhilarating, and the laughter has been so abundant, we've hardly noticed the lack of daylight and ventilation in our working quarters.<br /><br />So, I'm sorry I can't invite you to the showing -- unless I already have -- but fingers crossed, sooner or later there'll be a version that everyone can come along to. With or without squid.<br /><br />Once Cendrars at CPT is done and dusted, it's off down to the NT Studio for another week of R&amp;D, though on a project that could hardly be more different: a verbatim-based thing that I'm eager to make, based (at this stage at least) on an extraordinary set of interviews conducted at my behest with great generosity by Karl James of <a href="http://www.thedialogueproject.com/">The Dialogue Project</a> (and co-director of <span style="font-style: italic;">The Author</span> and other T. Crouch golden greats). I won't say too much about this one, forgive me -- the actors don't know a thing about it yet, really, so it would seem rude to tell you first. I <span style="font-style: italic;">can</span> exclusively reveal, with all the bravura force of Neil Sean's column in the Metro, that it looks like I'm going to have five very very exciting actors in the room, who, once again, as with the Cendrars, will perhaps be so kind as to save my <a href="http://cookurselfhappy.blogspot.com/2011/01/facon-fake-bacon.html">Facon</a> [TM] as I potter around trailed by <a href="http://sharetv.org/shows/the_flumps_uk/episodes/637507">the cloud of still-not-knowing-yet</a>.<br /><br />And then from there, Chris Goode &amp; Co goes straight up to Leeds, for another low-daylight week, this time at West Yorkshire Playhouse. For their very interesting and already manifestly productive <a href="http://www.wyp.org.uk/events/event_details.asp?event_ID=5615">Transform</a> season, we're doing something called <span style="font-style: italic;">Open House</span>, which goes a bit like this. Five of us (me and James Lewis again, with a different three performers: Tom Frankland, Jonny Liron and Theron Schmidt) will be ensconced for a week in a rehearsal room at WYP, from early morning to late evening every day from Monday 13th June, making a new piece, entirely and utterly from scratch (or not even scratch, really -- from itch... I'm sure I've probably tried that joke out here before, sorry), and in five days flat: we'll be showing a 'completed' (ha!) version on the Friday, with work-in-progress sharings from the Wednesday evening onwards. So far so frightening. What makes this doubly scary -- but, for me, the thing that makes it worth doing in the first place -- is that, right through the week, the door will be (metaphorically, at least) open. So anyone who wants to, whether they have any experience of theatre making or not, is welcome to rock up at any time with their Transform season wristband, and they'll be admitted to the rehearsal room: where they're invited to engage however they please. Some people, I expect, will just hang out and watch as things happen (or don't); others may want to be more involved in the conversation, or maybe bring us ideas or stimulus materials; others may actually want to be an embedded part of the process, whether for half an hour or half the week. In fact there could even be people in the cast on that Friday who we haven't met yet, who have never acted before and who have no idea right now that that's how they're going to be spending that evening. Which is kind of a fantastic thought. Feeling as tired as I currently do, I must admit the whole idea feels a bit more daunting now than when I conceived it a few months ago: but the challenge feels irresistible, still. More importantly, this isn't just a gimmick for Transform, a one-off novelty. Really I think a lot more work should, and could, be made like this. Certainly I think R&amp;D and rehearsal processes should be a lot more open, more porous. Hopefully <span style="font-style: italic;">Open House</span> will be an eyecatching way of making what could otherwise seem a merely theoretical point. When I started out I used to hate the idea of anyone peeking inside my rehearsal room; I felt my duty of care to the actors and creative team meant they should be protected, they should have a sense of a closed door. But lately I ask, more and more: protected from what? And can't the necessary care be taken of <span style="font-style: italic;">whoever</span> happens to come into the room? Certainly the sense of a closed door, whatever else it may be and whatever reassurances it may signal, is not much to do with theatre.<br /><br />Beyond <span style="font-style: italic;">Open House</span>... well, I won't go too far into the future. Work will continue on the new home piece, <span style="font-style: italic;">Where We Meet</span>, which is an exciting prospect; <span style="font-style: italic;">Wound Man and Shirley</span> will be at the Pleasance for the last week of the Edinburgh Fringe; and there are a few odd readings and other appearances coming up. I'll do my best to keep you posted.<br /><br />Have to say, I'm really hoping there's a week in all this somewhere -- maybe post-Edinburgh if not before -- where I can go away and have a bit of a rest and a think, maybe a big think. I won't get into it now but I had an experience about a month ago by which I was very shaken -- not in a bad way, just in an unsettled way -- which I haven't been anywhere near to having the kind of space it would take to really think about it. I've been very aware of suppressing it, or dealing with it only tentatively and in small cautious blips. Certainly while it's unresolved -- sorry, it's annoying to be so mysterious, but it's a huge story if I start to try and tell it -- I'm aware of it interfering with some of the work I'm trying to do: a little bit with the Cendrars and the verbatim piece, and massively with a little something I'm writing for the Bush, which was due weeks ago and about which I now feel turbulently conflicted. (Not in a way that will prevent me from finishing it -- all I need for that is a little bit of time.) It's the first time in a few years that something's happened in my life that feels too big to try and think about in a rehearsal room. I bet it's not, I just haven't found the way to make it fit yet. It's sort of nice to have it at the back of my mind, but it can't stay there for ever.<br /><br />I suppose one thing I should mention is that a significant birthday just passed, while the blog was sleeping. Not my 38th, which happened yesterday (despite all previous efforts to prevent it), but which I think we can safely say was wholly insignificant for all (un)concerned. But the fifth birthday of this blog, which, had we been paying attention, we might have celebrated (with a quiet lambada and a drunken fumble round the back of Vision Express) on May 13th. It's been on my mind for a while that once we got past the five year mark, I might start winding the blog down: it's started to feel a little repetitious -- almost everything I find myself wanting to say, I realise I've already said before, and usually better; and anyway it might be time to find a new format for the kind of thinking-space that I very much want to have as part of the rhythm of my work but which doesn't, after all, have to be a blog like this. I don't think I'll terminate it any time soon -- not, I should think, before the end of the year -- and I'm not anyway sure what to do. One thing I <span style="font-style: italic;">am </span>doing is starting the huge but actually quite entertaining (in an indulgent sort of way) task of putting together a book -- a 'best of <span style="font-style: italic;">Thompson's</span>' kind of affair -- which I hope might just sneak out in time for Christmas. I'm only a quarter of the way through exporting the posts into a workable document: but extrapolating from current statistics, it looks probable that the <span style="font-style: italic;">complete </span>Thompson's (which this book will definitely <span style="font-style: italic;">not</span> be, I promise) is now <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest_novels">considerably longer than <span style="font-style: italic;">War and Peace</span></a> -- or, for that matter, <span style="font-style: italic;">Infinite Jest</span>. Which makes me feel a bit better about not being here much the last few weeks.<br /><br />Right, well, I think that's us up to date, though I'll end on a few quick pointers towards things I'm currently enjoying. Favourite book of recent weeks has been Chris Kraus's <a href="http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&amp;tid=12485"><span style="font-style: italic;">Where Art Belongs</span></a>, which is small (it's from Semiotext(e) of course) and initially seems modest and laid-back but opens out into something much more expansive as well as turning out to be the kind of book that's a really good companion: great train reading. I've also been hugely enjoying Raphael Zarka's <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Raphael-Zarka-Chronicle-Skateboarding-1799-2009/dp/2917855193"><span style="font-style: italic;">On A Day With No Waves: A Chronicle of Skateboarding 1779-2009</span></a>; Kit Wright's wonderful collected poems, <a href="http://www.faber.co.uk/work/hoping-it-might-be-so/9780571243471/"><span style="font-style: italic;">Hoping It Might Be So</span></a> -- no, I know, I'm not supposed to like Kit Wright, but I always have and I like him even more now: a truly wonderful composer of verse, modulating tonally with rare assurance, playing with rhyme in a contagiously delighted way, and -- when he dares to get serious -- more than capable of landing big emotional moments with enviable understatement: he literally, and unusually, can take the breath away; and George Hunka's gripping, really rather ravishing <a href="http://newbooksintheater.com/2011/05/01/george-hunka-word-made-flesh-philosophy-eros-and-contemporary-tragic-drama-eyecorner-press-2011/"><span style="font-style: italic;">Word Made Flesh: Philosophy, Eros and Contemporary Tragic Drama</span></a>. I think I had better wait until the traffic calms before I make a serious attempt on J.H. Prynne's <a href="http://www.barquepress.com/herbert.html"><span style="font-style: italic;">George Herbert, 'Love [III]': A Discursive Commentary</span></a>, which is sitting on my desk quite patiently and sensibly, and makes my heart beat faster even so.<br /><br />As for music, I've been really excited about a couple of albums I've picked up in the past week or so: the new <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ1LI-NTa2s">tUnE-yArDs</a>, <span style="font-style: italic;">W H O K I L L</span>, which is a gorgeous riot; and <span style="font-style: italic;">Feel It Break </span>by <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LJtMrhb558">Austra</a>, which I heard playing in Fopp and immediately fell head-over-heels for. I also, after many years of searching, managed to track down a CD copy of <span style="font-style: italic;">Quark</span>, the first album by the saxophone quartet <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWtcnBS3-L4">Itchy Fingers</a> who were briefly prominent in the British jazz scene in the early 90s: it's quite wonderful, really, not as dated as I feared and full of humour and insane virtuosity (and a couple of cameo appearances by Stanley Unwin, of all people); it's only made me hanker for other mainstream British jazz stuff from that late 80s / early 90s period when the Loose Tubes collective were being feted and Andy Sheppard and Courtney Pine were breaking through to a relatively big audience: it's a great shame so little of that stuff is available digitally or on CD.<br /><br />Tonight's deeply-embedded earworm, though, with which I'll leave you (but handle with care, you might not want it stuck in your brain as it is in mine -- actually I'm quite enjoying it!), is Bob Morgan's exquisite library track 'Marguerite', which those of a similar vintage to the Controlling T. will perhaps dimly recognize as the tune that replaced Stanley Myers's 'Cavatina' as the restful soundtrack to the Gallery section of the tv programme <span style="font-style: italic;">Take Hart</span>, some time in the early 80s I would guess. I don't suppose I'd heard it between about the age of thirteen and, well, today; a musical madeleine <span style="font-style: italic;">par excellence</span>.<br /><br /><br /><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/svxJRTsRVtk?rel=0" allowfullscreen="" width="425" frameborder="0" height="349"></iframe><br /><br /><br />OK, well, you should probably expect another little period of dormancy, I'm afraid. If you miss me, why not come and see me do something in the real world instead? It's not necessarily wrong.<br /><br />xxChris Goodehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17993698000314709291noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28051672.post-28967830657327536952011-04-16T10:31:00.000+01:002011-04-16T10:32:44.271+01:00Kenilworth Castle, £7.60: "Sham Wedding" (Pyramidal Chaconne)<div><br /></div><div>Quiet times here of late, for which my apologies. The mostly invisible upside is that there's <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">lots</span> going on in what we may as well persist in calling 'the real world', and it's that, rather than ennui or chickenpox, that's kept me from dropping in. The sidebar list of upcoming performances tells only a little of the story; be assured I'll keep you informed about other stuff as it goes live.</div><div><br /></div><div>I have a couple of posts currently in mind for these pages: a biggun about some recent adventures in visual art and gay film, which I ought to try and get written before I forget everything I ever knew about my recent adventures in visual art and gay film; and a smaller piece inspired by an intriguing figure in the world of moneyspinning charisma -- no, not Lesley Joseph, not this time. I fear only one of these posts, at most, will emerge before the next big deadline in the calendar, which is my London Word Festival showing of an early draft of a new solo piece called <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Keep Breathing</span>. That's a gorgeous project to be working on but there's loads to do and it will keep me frighteningly busy for the next fortnight. So, apologies in advance if Thompson's is a little somnolent for a while longer.</div><div><br /></div><div>What I <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">can</span> pop in your in-tray, by way of a snacky bon-bon, is a new short video piece.</div><div><br /></div><div>I can't remember if I mentioned it here but while I was on tour with <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Author</span> -- while we were in Kenilworth, to be precise -- I had one of those dreams that makes you inconveniently want immediately to start writing, notwithstanding it's five in the morning. What came out in that first scrawlfest was fiercely angry and incoherent, and it trailed off pretty quickly as the dream dissipated and the stark realities of an autumn morning in a chilly farmhouse started to impinge.</div><div><br /></div><div>But I took the notes that I'd started making, and tried to salvage something from them by creating -- as I often do when I'm writing poetry -- an armature, a dependable skeletal structure to help hold the writing together. I won't explain what that structure looked like, we'd both be here a lot longer than either of us would wish: but the clue is in one of the poem's subtitles: 'pyramidal chaconne'. Those who give a tosslet will be able to figure out the rest with some light Wikipediatrics: though there's no great benefit to doing so -- there's enough latitude in the tone and the specific moment-to-moment choices that even knowing exactly what the structure was probably wouldn't help to explain the more productive oddities of the poem: whose full title is, elaborately: 'Kenilworth Castle, £7.60: "Sham Wedding" (Pyramidal Chaconne)'.</div><div><br /></div><div>At any rate, I finished the text itself as the tour neared its end, last November, and then quickly made a soundtrack for it in snatched moments in Lisbon. The first (and, so far, only) public performance was at an event at The Situation Room, on the weekend after I got back from Portugal. It came apart a little at the seams, but that was inevitable -- it's a fearsomely difficult, tongue-twistery piece to perform, especially with next to no rehearsal -- and anyway it didn't matter much, as I segued out of it directly into the crowd-pleasing 'Blurt Study #4: "Seat / Pants" (for Peter Manson)', during the performance of which I am drenched by a watering can from on high, such that the printed text I'm reading disintegrates as I'm holding it.</div><div><br /></div><div>It occurred to me over Christmas that it might be fun to make a video version of the piece, given that the audio was all already in place: and so at odd moments since January I've been scavenging various YouTube clips that seemed to fit with the tightly sectional nature of the poem. (I actually got these by writing a responsive parallel text of thirty shorter phrases, each of which I then used as the source of a search string in YouTube, and I tried to use something from the first page of results in each case.) Three months on, the video is finally finished, I've just uploaded it to Vimeo, and now you can be among the first to see it. It's not my best work but I'm not un-pleased with it, by and large.</div><div><br /></div><div>The spoken text is -- purposefully -- quite hard to decipher at points, so I've pasted it below the video: <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">et voila</span>, you can follow along in your hymn book. (I nonetheless recommend listening on headphones if you want to pick up on all the detail.) I should say, perhaps over-cautiously, that the video has elements that you may find disagreeable; in fact the whole sorry caboodle might perhaps be considered NSFW, though it's hard to say exactly why.</div><div><br /></div><div>Those readers who <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">hate</span> this sort of thing might kindly forgive me: I'll be back with something a little more like the usual baleful skungpoomery before you know it.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/22465153?color=ff9933" width="480" height="360" frameborder="0"></iframe><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">KENILWORTH CASTLE, £7.60: “SHAM WEDDING” (PYRAMIDAL CHACONNE)</span></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">1</span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span></div><div>At complex number a.m. it’s dread wakes me but rain dots hold me in the crack of a staticky sheen:</div><div><br /></div><div>and the fallen stimulate a census urge I need love to say what are our figures lately.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">2</span></div><div>The slit is so thin / the task is so high / my aim is so false / my arse is in rags.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">3 </span></div><div>Wrong is a kind of smoothness, like dancefloor moves like mimicked by a chimp in a white suit. This is against the coming in for tea.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">4</span></div><div>I am washing my hands in another man’s diarrhoea.</div><div><br /></div><div>And lived I where this happens would actually be doing so now, and the sweet aroma of Eton mess while isn’t it coarse to keep breathing.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">5</span></div><div>In Budapest where my hands are tied / in Lisbon where my tongue is depressed / in Dublin where the streets are so bloody. Privatised unheld infinite.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">6</span></div><div>On a flat bed we no longer possess, with the dead light winkling out our illnesses and touchedness to a faulty wire, you skin me.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">7</span></div><div>Gymnastic / peripatetic / whirling fell swoop one last shot at modular synthesis in ankle-socks and money-pig and the slats of some rotating lampshade.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">8</span></div><div>looping holy immunity boomlit moonlit lithobook milkpint kingpin pill</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">9</span></div><div>I am hesitating to recall a particular instance of his undressing which is painful to remember that although he took off his plain black t-shirt and his red skin was it did not quite actually he’s married now.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">10</span></div><div>We’re just trying to speak. We’re trying to stroke with our hands the hair of a dead girl. My eyes drawn upwards towards the past. My vulva is the first place I ever knew anguish.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">11</span></div><div>A gazillion spondoolicks heaped at a playboy boatshow in a Japanese metropolis where antics are prized like whistles and nothing is a hand-me-down.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">12</span></div><div>down is not holy in skin tied sweet white so lately</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">13</span></div><div>Filigree my always recourse as if your body were sugarwork, and every second cousin were a fond set text, a lovely array of your selves. Icing saintly. Slip of a thing.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">14</span></div><div>2012. Ten young black men from Hackney will be endlessly re-enacting the failed suicide attempts of Stephen Fry on a big screen by a car wash in a mud slide in the end times.</div><div><br /></div><div>(But it still just says Stephen Fry.)</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">15</span></div><div style="text-align: center;">steep pent fright</div><div style="text-align: center;">steer rent friend</div><div style="text-align: center;">stranded defended</div><div style="text-align: center;">end to end</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">16</span></div><div>SHAM. MY SHAM WEDDING.</div><div>SCAM.<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"> [scream]</span> Can you tell mayonnaise from furniture.</div><div>SCAB HAT. BLACK LEG CAP. EGG WALLOP.</div><div>Raindrops keep falling on my <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">[scream]</span> SHAME ON YOU.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">17</span></div><div>Framboise mazurka, skull &amp; crossbones. Hi there! looking for some fun in null. Following Brent Corrigan on Twitter. Dill pickle sorbet avec maximum capers. Mini-Milk. Titty play.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">18</span></div><div>Sleep freeze: the merest meme scheme seems speechless serene. We delve, we feel free. Sex spree pell-mell. Semen teem. Legs elevenses.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">19</span></div><div>Heather is hell loves leather. The tarantella foam and passacaglia froth. Fumble is a sidekick: pollen count spout and handle with care in a den of force kisses. Stipple of scrub.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">20</span></div><div>Tilt shine sights to skate take-off. Tickle take pains het slip gig to aim to arm to penis to deface to clockface scar. Rage against het. Sigh chime. Fish scythe.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">21</span></div><div>The 21-year-old actor tells MTV News he's watched in horror as a wave of gay teen suicides has swept. The 21-year-old farmer. Goatherd. 21-year-old cardigan. 21-year-old dust mite. Particle.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">22</span></div><div>A miss miss miss is a miss is a miss is miss is as good is as good is as good is as good as a good as a good as a miss is as good as a mile as a mile as a mile as a mile mile mile.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">23</span></div><div>Wasteland to castle to jump-pit imaginary snake to scab over-knee hand snatch ghost growth in underwear / you are / you named in the / you heart / stretch to reach / temporary sheriff of not-Nottingham.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">24</span></div><div>The BBC’s chief political correspondent is diarrhoea and vomiting. Iolanthe; Ruddigore. Basically sickness and diarrhoea. Pinafore. Gondoliers. Nothing rhymed.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">25</span></div><div>Black streets don’t show up on film. Pan back to the boiled bodies of Dresden. Dry streets on film. Backstreet’s back: black words, markless. Pearly Jesus. Vitruvian gay teen.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">26</span></div><div>O! the huge manatee. Clothes-jam / car jumble mindset. Dogs are amazing naked. All together: if you want to know if he loves you so it’s in his piss. That’s where it is.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">27</span></div><div>Shoop. Loop of purest schooling, a flock paper, caraway seeds; cyan aria, white sky: greenest feet, field is pale. Riverdead.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">28</span></div><div>English Heritage landfill aggro David Bellamy golf umbrella: barley flag malady druid ogre fail and harbinger of rubbish. Subsoil foe hanger barge band leafy grove dread flog marmalade. Binatone Pong.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">29</span></div><div>PARADE deeper dearer paper drape pare rape pea.</div><div style="text-align: right;">Ash seam scene shame cinema amnesiac CASH MACHINE.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">30</span></div><div>Rainfall. <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Kraut und Rüben</span>. 15,300 days; breathe stand touch tongues. I need love missing you already. We’re just trying to tell them that it’s not wrong.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div></div>Chris Goodehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17993698000314709291noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28051672.post-50172083118680405822011-03-19T15:12:00.015+00:002011-03-21T08:20:09.035+00:00The writing is on the wall<div><br /></div><div>...or, for those who prefer a more stylish rendering: <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">l</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style=""><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">'</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">ecriture est sur le mur </span>-- which I like because its rhymes remind me of Stevie Smith's poem: "Aloft / In the loft / Sits Croft; / He is soft." -- But, ah, I have digressed before I've even begun. Triumph!</div><div><br /></div><div>This week has been an exercise (largely but not wholly unsuccessful) in trying to clear my desk, work through the in-tray, and declutter my head in advance of what I think will be quite a testing upcoming week at the Royal Court. (I was going to point you towards tickets for <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Extremists </span>on Friday but I see that, gratifyingly if a little alarmingly, the web site indicates that we have now sold out. I can't quite believe that, and even if it's so, there must surely be returns on the day. Still and all. Crikey.)</div><div><br /></div><div>Among the springcleaning tasks I've wanted to take care of this week are two separate blog posts, each of which, as I've carried it around in my head without quite having the wherewithal to knuckle down to it, has expanded a bit dauntingly -- that scary tickle you get as you anticipate trying to write about something, where you realise the size of it has become either tantalising or malign, but probably not both, and you won't know which it is until you start. The posts I was thinking about were, firstly, something on Monday's Devoted &amp; Disgruntled event on queer theatre, and some matters arising; and, secondly, on <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Extremists </span>in relation to Aleks Sierz's newly-published <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Rewriting the Nation: British Theatre Today.</span> Both big topics, the kind an inveterate burbler like me could easily get lost wandering around in. And because I was anxious about losing so much time to them, and because if I only wrote one then whichever it was would feel like it was at the expense of the other, I've just sat on them both, and they've continued to burgeon beneath the sweltering largesse of my lipopygian incubations.</div><div><br /></div><div>Interestingly, though -- it's OK, you <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">may</span> disagree with that assessment -- I woke this morning to find that the two imaginary posts had overnight expanded to the point where they were touching, where they seemed in some degree to be somewhat about each other as well as about themselves. And so I've resolved to try and write both at once, one I expect still after the other (though a proper intermingled back-and-forth might also be interesting) but expecting them to be read as a diptych.</div><div><br /></div><div>The other factor that's pressing in, not in an unwelcome way I must say, is that I only have a couple of hours' writing time before I need to get out of here. (Off, via an errand or two, to see Ben Webb's <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://taraarts.ticketsolve.com/shows/126513418/events">His Spread Legs</a> </span>at Tara Arts this evening -- looking forward to it very much, I haven't seen any of Ben's work before, though I've read a script of this one and have every reason to be pleased by the prospect of seeing it.) So away with nuance! Fie on you, prevarication! Begone, exactly this sort of vacuous rhetorical lollygagging!</div><div><br /></div><div>Excuse, then, the rough edges of what follows: the first draft of a first draft.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">* * *</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Monday night's D&amp;D satellite on queer theatre was the first of the monthly events that I'd been to, and I'm really glad I was asked to host it (and glad also that I agreed -- it wasn't immediately obvious to me that I would): it made sure of my attendance. Hosting was a largely ceremonial function, I wrote the invitation and said a few words at the start, that was it.<br /></div><div><br /></div><div>I say I wasn't sure about hosting because actually I think I carry a lot of baggage about queer-designated work, about queer audiences above all and the different communities of queer artists, some of which hardly intersect. The phrase "queer community" gets bandied about a bit (not least by us, by all of the us-es) but I know that the queer community that <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">I</span> feel like I'm a part of is not the same as -- though of course it intersects with -- the queer community where others would place themselves. Not least because queers are often refuseniks, suspicious of community (an idea that's often stood for something violent or repressive or stultifying in our lives), sometimes happier standing -- and certainly <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">speaking </span>-- only for ourselves. And in sometimes doing concertedly queer-facing work I've often felt an anxiety around my responsibilities -- whatever they might be, however hard they might be to define: the more nebulous they are, it sometimes seems, the weightier they paradoxically get -- to those queers who are looking on. </div><div><br /></div><div>I remember doing a preview of <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Kiss of Life</span> back in 2002 for which the tiny audience was almost entirely composed of a group of gay men, all of them more or less identically dressed, tribally utterly distinct, who sat along the back two rows with their arms folded, and squirmed silently throughout the whole thing (almost certainly displeased that I, the solo performer, wasn't the nice-looking boy on the flyer, but instead a geeky fatso who probably wasn't going to take his shirt off -- it might be a small mercy if I didn't, but either way, their evening was ruined). Queer, as opposed to gay, audiences are easier, in my experience, they're more comfortable with multiplicity and polyphony, but I'm very aware that I don't <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">personally</span> signal strongly as queer, even though my work is irrecuperably and on occasion quite insistently queer: and I do think that matters to some audiences and to some fellow artists.</div><div><br /></div><div>So I was initially reluctant to agree to be the host for this queer D&amp;D, because I'm aware of carrying that sense that a lot of good and righteous queers will look at me and think I'm not the right person to be chosen to hold the conch, to write the invitation, to suggest the frame of the conversation. I don't look queer enough, or sound queer enough, or act queer enough, or my work isn't queer enough, or my lifestyle isn't queer enough, or none of it's the right <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">kind</span> of queer; I'm never seen at most of the crucial queer spaces for performance and socialising, or on the queer circuit. I keep an eye on some of that work, I'm friendly with people for whom that stuff is home from home: but it's not me, and I thought maybe a D&amp;D on queer theatre might get off on the wrong foot unless it was hosted by someone that the most engaged queer artists would recognize and feel aligned with.</div><div><br /></div><div>Mostly of course this is about projected fear -- though I think it's not wholly without foundation -- and my promise to myself was that I would accept the invitation to host only if I could then explicitly acknowledge in my opening remarks this sense of being seen and not-seen, the pitfall of being judged but not heard, and wanting very much to preserve the 'open space' of D&amp;D as a room in which disagreement is certainly possible, but made fruitful by emerging out of engaged dialogue rather than factional distrust.</div><div><br /></div><div>As it was, the queer artists (and queer-curious allies) who turned up at a beautifully revivified Oval House on Monday evening were, perhaps self-selectingly, a less than horse-frightening bunch, and in my dismal cardigan and M&amp;S jeans I didn't feel at all like an outlier. (Funny, I see it more and more, how we endlessly re-enact the playground anxieties that shaped our lives as ten-year-olds.) In fact, if anything, even I found it a bit cosy, compared with the more robust feel of the main D&amp;D, the big hall, the crowd of people, the degree of diversity that's normally to be seen. (Less so this January, actually, and that D&amp;D maxim that "whoever comes are the right people" begins to chafe a little in what might, erroneously I think, be construed as its complacency.) An almost entirely white, able-bodied classroom's-worth may still have made for some tensions on Monday, certainly an interesting quality of silence at the start: but it did feel a little redolent of -- as Scottee, typically bracingly, puts it in his excellent <a href="http://scottee-scottee.blogspot.com/2011/03/call-me-anything-you-like-but-not-queer.html">blog post</a> about the event -- "white homos talking about other white homos". (I think actually, once you started really listening to people, there was a terrific amount of <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">difference</span> in the room, but certainly, cosmetically, it was not the exotic zoo-like assemblage for which I'd been braced.)</div><div><br /></div><div>It was Scottee's first D&amp;D, and once he'd let go of his early anger and cynicism it was amazingly useful to have him there (alongside a couple of other key folks who weren't the sort to rock a wilted cardie, one of them the delightful <a href="http://blog.amylame.com/">Amy Lamé</a>, co-originator of Duckie and indefatigable appearer-in-things); when he emailed some days earlier to say he'd be coming along I was really glad, partly because I knew he'd be able to bring news from a part of the world where I seldom set foot. As he mentions in his blog post, among the questions I'd set up for the event in my invitation was: "Is queer over? Have we arrived at post-queer already?" I was saying so with exactly the little knowledge that is sometimes a dangerous thing -- knowing from occasional spells standing downwind of the ragged fringes of the grapevine that some people would be saying an emphatic 'yes' to those questions, but not yet feeling like I understood why -- and I was hoping that, not for the first time, D&amp;D would dispel that danger by putting me in a room with some people who could tell me more.</div><div><br /></div><div>Queer is, for me, both a word and an idea that's absolutely at the heart of who I am, and so it's difficult to bear with the assertion of Scottee and his friends that queer is 'dead': but I do understand it. I strongly remember the consternation that greeted the publication of Mark Simpson's breezily provocative essay collection <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Anti-gay-Sexual-politics-Mark-Simpson/dp/0304331449/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1300553858&amp;sr=8-1">Anti-Gay</a> </span>back in 1996, and how utterly and thankfully I identified with its gesture, if not with every jot and tittle of its contents. It seems to make sense that a new generation would want to distance itself from the orthodoxies it has inherited. The paradox, though, which is worth asserting, is that of course queer was always (supposed to be) about the unorthodox, about fluidity and change. When I wrote on queer theatre for Total Theatre Magazine a few years ago, I borrowed from Martha Graham the title 'Endless Becoming', suggesting that both theatre and queerness were about restlessness, about a constant arcing towards a destination that's never really envisaged and certainly never arrived at. (For those who like the theory bits -- skip this if you don't! -- : this was important to me as a way of describing a territory for politically agitating theatre that was neither liminal -- and thus unable to register as dissident within a wider, arrestedly liminoid culture -- nor wholly incorporative, i.e. attempting to square the circle of occupying designated social space while seeking to secure an indicative mood that was fully continuous with the realm of nonmatrixed action: but instead was in a state of constant re-entry, a perpetual motion out of the liminal and towards the incorporative, continually acting out the eventual disavowal of liminoid permissiveness without ever itself becoming stable or fixed.)</div><div><br /></div><div>The problem is that, in some quarters, queer very definitely <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">did</span> arrive somewhere, and got stuck there. I've certainly felt it myself about those parts of queer culture that I didn't personally want or directly need and didn't feel I belonged to. Queer had become not a way of seeing, or a political commitment, but a commodified set of aesthetics, distantly representing a value code that felt completely frozen and unexamined, unlived even. If the conformity and the meagreness of mainstream gay culture felt bewilderingly inhospitable to difference (except where that difference could be fetishized into a racist or generational cliche), so there was a strain of queer culture -- perhaps its most visible strain in the mainstream media -- that was, to some of us, even more disappointing in the narrowness of its lexicon, and in its fixation on an iconography that seemed to signal nothing beyond its own dependence on instant recognition and a kind of simulation of the socially 'disturbing' that was nothing of the sort, precisely because it so quickly became a set of saleable, assimilable tropes.</div><div><br /></div><div>In other words, there is, I'd agree, a version of queer that, as it were, forgot itself, that was secretly relieved to find that it was supremely viable as a participant both on the edges of a mainstream culture to which it was miming an opposition (just as certain forms of protest are supremely viable as participants in the prosecution of liberal democracy) and also, more ruinously, in the crowded marketplace of tradeable images. Here's the problem: the good things about queer -- the creative pleasure of multiplicity, of individual distinction, of diversity, of restlessness -- are all things on which <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">innovation</span> thrives: and nothing eats up innovation like capitalism. Innovation is <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">the</span> fossil fuel of "post-industrial" capitalism itself. It must be hard to understand the extent to which one is feeding capitalism if one's work appears to occupy queer social spaces and if, like so many queer artists, your own existence is teetering on the breadline at best. And yet, Scottee et al are right to have sensed the exhaustion of that particular subculture: as an identifiable aesthetic, queer is, and was, as good as dead -- though of course <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">that</span> queer was only ever an impostor anyway; the true spirit of queerness slipped through those grasping fingers and out through the emergency exit long ago.</div><div><br /></div><div>What, then, is post-queer? For Scottee, at least, and for people who want and need something post-queer (I don't, for now; but then, apart from anything else, I appreciate how lucky I am that no one ever called me 'queer' in anger or spite, and I understand how the act of continuing to reclaim the word is different for me than it would be for someone who was 'queer' to hostile others, in the playground or the workplace), the crucial shift seems to be more about language than about aesthetics or ideology. For now, and in recent times -- eighteen months, maybe? -- the word that's been pressed into service for this circle of friends is 'trans'. 'Trans', with its connotations of movement, of crossing-over, the redolence particularly of 'transgressive', is the word that currently enables someone like Scottee to hear and relate to pretty much all the things that I hear in 'queer' and they, for various perfectly legitimate reasons, don't. What's more, of course, it presently functions only as an adjective, not as a noun: it qualifies, it modifies, but it doesn't <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">stand for</span> or wholly take the place of, a more complex picture. I don't mind saying I'm "a queer", at least around people who'll understand what I mean by that; I don't imagine 'trans' ever settling into similar nounhood. Nor can one imagine it passing easily into playground argot as a term of abuse: it's just not that sort of word, partly of course precisely because it won't be a noun, it won't do the violent work of erasure as 'queer' will in the wrong hands.</div><div><br /></div><div>The only question that arises for me around the word itelf is that, at the point that I arrived at the event on Monday, and even when Scottee used the word in the title of the session he called -- "Where does trans sit in queer?", I was certainly hearing 'trans' as I've been accustomed to it, as the identification-of-choice of many people whose experience is of being transgender or other-than-cisgendered. (Incidentally, there's a good and useful Guardian piece by Roz Kaveney <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/jun/30/trans-language-transgender?INTCMP=SRCH">here</a> for those, like me, who would like to take care of their language choices in this space where sensitivities are inevitably acute: though it's from last year and I wonder what an updated version would look like.) So to hear Scottee describing 'trans' in terms that seemed more or less to <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">uncouple</span> it from gender identification -- as he says in his blog piece, "Trans for me is a borderless, sexless, genderless and gateless community" -- was quite a jolt. I'd be interested to know whether this extension of 'trans' into (to borrow from Scottee again) "being whatever it is you want to be today" is something that trans people whose personal identification is specifically transgender or MTF or FTM find acceptable. Perhaps they're fine, and of course anyway "they're" an amazingly heterogeneous community anyway, teeming with different views and perspectives. But if nothing else it feels as though there might be some discontinuity between a 'trans' identification that is performative and playful and full of trans-ience (the "today"ness), and one beneath which lies a continuing story of struggle and oppression and pain, a story told partly by others, and often low on fabulousness; "being whatever it is you want to be today" is a motto guaranteed by whatever degree of privilege we take the idea of 'freedom of choice' to imply; my understanding is that for many transgender people, their lived reality is one of stark choice, or no choice at all, and of precious little freedom. -- But here I am, about the most blandly cisgendered queer man you could ever hope to encounter, and I don't feel OK about saying much more than this on this bit of the topic: that's for trans people of all stripes to discuss for themselves. (One quick footnote is that this newer use of 'trans' feels, for the moment, not too pervasive. For instance I'd really love to attend an event in the upcoming London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival which is a <a href="http://www.bfi.org.uk/llgff/events/25th_anniversary_programme_events/1442">discussion around feminist pornography</a>: but it's open to "women and trans people only". I understand why that's considered necessary and I don't object, though I'm disappointed -- if anyone wants to have a parallel conversation with me on the same topic someplace else, that'd be nice; but it's pretty clear that a cisgendered male, whatever his queer credentials, isn't going to be welcome at that event. But, sure, of course, institutions are seldom as "gateless" as ideas are.)</div><div><br /></div><div>I do, however, feel that this rebranding exercise, however valid the reasons and however appealing the personal and social realities it describes and responds to, is problematic. (I'm not meaning "rebranding" in a concertedly pejorative or diminishing sense.) It's good to hear Scottee describe 'trans' as an entirely political index, rather than one inherently concerned with sexuality or gender; that's how I've mostly felt about queer -- I do still struggle a bit with self-designating queers whose habitual sexual orientation is hetero, though I've seldom met a hetero queer who wasn't at the very least sincere: but aside from that, I've never found a better way of putting it, for myself, than when I told a post-show audience for <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Hey Mathew</span> in Bradford that I would rather like to describe my politics as queer and my sexuality as anticapitalist. (I'm mindful that there's a blank census form downstairs waiting for me to get properly busy with this bullshine...) So I have no problem with 'trans' as a political position or affiliation <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">per se</span>; I just wonder where the political thread of trans is going.</div><div><br /></div><div>So: trans rather than queer because, as Scottee suggests in his blog, queer died when Time Out caught up with it and made it a buzzword. (I know exactly what he means, though it doesn't stop either of us promoting our work on our web sites etc. with approving quotes from that very magazine.) This being the cultural landscape into which Scottee made his entrance, he suggested, when I asked him, that the shift towards 'trans' was largely a generational movement: though that's not the whole story, as -- I hope it's not indecorous to point out -- Amy, who was enthusiastically endorsing trans identification at D&amp;D, is a couple of years older than I am. Moreover, as I joined Scottee's session he was explaining the difference between trans and trans(gender), with as much patience and as little condescension as I suppose he could by then muster, to my friend the poet and activist Francesca Lisette, who, at a guess, is pretty much exactly the same age as Scottee, and who, like me, feels like there's plenty of juice in 'queer' still. This may be partly because she, also like me, has a view of queer that's partly (not wholly) shaped by queer theory and queer criticism, while the new trans culture is, apparently, pretty distrustful of the role of the academy in developing the language and discourse of queerness. Again I've some sympathy with this, though I think it would maybe help to distinguish between the institution, with all its encumbrances, and smart people, who can tell us a story about ourselves in such a way that we come to see differently, and perhaps in a richer or more complicated way, who we've been and where we're all going. At any rate, to call this a generational shift is not the whole story: it certainly has to do partly with specifically metropolitan culture and the circulation of a particular network of opinion formers and early adopters within that culture.</div><div><br /></div><div>The new trans generation (let's go with 'generation' for ease of use) has, I think, quite acutely and correctly identified the importance of language in determining the vectors of its living/working practice: but what remains to be achieved is a really careful discrimination between what it's rejecting and how it's enacting that refusal. The queer that is 'dead' or 'over' is not a theoretical programme or an ideological praxis: those elements that I call 'queer' and they call 'trans' have been largely retained, as far as I can see. At one level what they're rejecting is an aesthetic, or perhaps more exactly the lived experience of inhabiting a <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">demimonde</span> in which that aesthetic has come to prevail; yet, again, trans performance looks, from this (respectful but not remote) distance, at least continuous with what has come before: there is a refreshed emphasis on plurality, but if you look at, for example, the way that Jodie Harsh's club Circus, in which Scottee performs tonight at the Junction in Cambridge, <a href="http://thisiscircus.com/site/?page_id=12">presents itself</a> (in its marketing copy) there's nothing there that feels like a decisive break with the past -- in fact, the reference back to legendary clubs like "Studio 54, Taboo, Kinky Gerlinky and BoomBox" seems intended to place Circus in a prestigious lineage; whatever else trans is, it's not Year Zero.</div><div><br /></div><div>If, then, the shift to 'trans' is mostly about a language signal intended to get out in front of the exhaustion that happens to brands which think they belong "at the center of the cool map" (to borrow from the Circus flyer again) but with which the dreary normals who read Time Out have caught up, then it's going to have to keep happening: every five or seven years, this logic runs, we have to reboot, regenerate <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Dr Who-</span>stylee, because otherwise we end up back in a place where we're not fully distinguished from the wretched zone of heteronormativity; we have to not end up assimilated. Yet it's worth mentioning that the other time I dropped in on the trans group at D&amp;D they were talking about mainstream acceptance, and about how it ought to be possible for trans artists to work in mainstream contexts without being accused of selling out or betraying their community; it was a bit like hearing people asking for absolution in advance for sins they were really looking forward to committing. And indeed it should be possible for queer / trans to go to the mainstream -- and Amy, for one, has made a sustained career out of doing that, and everyone I know, as far as I know, is glad of her visibility and the niche she's made. But if anything's pushing back against that, the kind of mobility that Scottee's on-the-hoof <a href="http://scottee-scottee.blogspot.com/2011/03/call-me-anything-you-like-but-not-queer.html">diagram</a> describes (...sometimes I'm mainstream, sometimes I'm avantgarde; sometimes I want Weetos for breakfast and sometimes I want Cheerios...), it's not the envy or the holier-than-thou distaste of the community who think they own you. Rather, it's the inevitable payback you get from participating in a marketplace that wants to swallow your novelty-value (as not very fully distinct from innovation) whole and spit you back out with nothing but the imperative to come back with more. As it's currently posited, queer is old and trans is new because there is a big machine that wants new, and vivacious opportunities arise from responding when the big machine demands to be fed.</div><div><br /></div><div>The trouble with trans performance as it currently manifests, or as I currently understand it, is that club culture is both an upstream and a downstream space. It runs on incredibly short <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_to_market">time-to-market.</a> (The corporate language is not by any means a red herring, though I appreciate it will seem a little disgusting...) Anyone can be putting together a look or an act in the afternoon, in their bedroom, and hit (or make an advertised appearance at) whichever club in the evening and potentially truly change the centre of gravity of that whole culture. This is an exemplary upstream practice in some respects, and rather beautiful and honourable and certainly exciting: the problem is that the motor of that innovation is at least as much commercial as it is artistic, and the media types and the poor shabby Time Out journos waiting for the trickledown are not well placed to make the distinction even if it were worth making.</div><div><br /></div><div>This is not to say that trans culture, as it currently exists (or as I infer it), is not predicated on political grounds, as Scottee says. But everything is, English National Ballet is, 'Pointless' on BBC2 is. Political premises need examination, no matter how overt and open they already appear. In a way, trans is a victim -- an eager one at that -- of exactly the permissiveness that made queer likewise so exploitable by cynical and commercial interests and ultimately hastened what Scottee and others see as its demise. The whole of the D&amp;D event, more or less inevitably, resounded with one question, tolling like a bell: "What do <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">you</span> mean by queer?" Everyone's version of queer makes sense to them, and maybe to their friends; nobody's really makes sense to everybody. So, how do we then have the conversation, with so little apparent common ground in which to stand together? Where is the language we can use to have this conversation with? Scottee's response to this is faultlessly scrupulous in a way: "whether it be trans or queer a group of people cannot be defined by it -- the word is owned by the person". This certainly feels right, at least to a point: but then, does it become impossible to talk about trans culture, or even trans cultures, except as an agglomeration of isolated scraps of narrative? If the limit is the personal, the individual, then how do we make trans (or queer) ramify socially, politically, except as a series of semaphoric waves across a ravine of misunderstanding?</div><div><br /></div><div>Ultimately, the problem with settling for the personal as the model unit of political activity is that it accepts -- and I mean hook line and sinker -- the premise of the question that capitalist modes of production want to ask it. (You can see that acceptance partly in Scottee's diagram, in which, though the x's may be scattered according to daily whim, the perimeter is still formed of binaries, each of which describes an axis: male / female; mainstream / avant garde; LGBT / straight, etc. Queer, at least in its anticapitalist renditions, can't abide that. "So are you gay or straight?" "Nope.") There is I guess some little extra leeway given that, in a vaguely Deleuzian sense, the queer / trans individual is already 'several', and "personal" therefore stands for that complex. But "being whatever it is you want to be today" is not merely a brand essence to place alongside Microsoft's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_do_you_want_to_go_today%3F">"Where do you want to go today?"</a> or Nike's "Just do it": it's a pretty filed-down summary of the Thatcherite (and subsequently Blairite) assault on class narrative. I'm pretty certain that's<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"> </span>not what Scottee believes or wants: but I do think there's a danger that 'trans' as an idea arrives too quickly at that place, where individual self-actualization is privileged over the production of social or civic meaning because we find ourselves unable to understand well enough what other people are trying to tell us about their lives. (One way of seeing it -- for the fellow thirtysomethings... When I first encountered queer, early in the 90s -- grubby fanzines and Dennis Cooper and the nihilism of early Gregg Araki movies -- it felt very like punk; the queer of the new millennium, in which I was active as an artist and in the way I tried to live my life, was more about trying to envision and build new communities, with much of the sincerity and ambitiousness of post-punk; trans, in its emphasis on individual self-determination and, by extension, strategic alliances rather than communities of interest as such, feels a bit like the lethal turn of post-punk towards New Romanticism -- which we associate with the Thatcherite "economic miracle" but which had its origins in a refusal of the crushing drabness of urban Britain at the start of the 80s. Spirits were lifted of course but only the individual, acting alone and speaking only for themselves, was light enough to take flight and transcend the grimness. And then the first generation of New Romantics started making serious money and the rest is, well, miserable, really, if you think about it.)</div><div><br /></div><div>"Here's a radical idea," Scottee finishes by saying: "let's just LIVE!" And who wouldn't feel a tug of enthusiasm for that. The idea of shucking off all the language problems and dropping the ideological baggage and just getting on with being whoever-the-fuck-we-are is like a kind of balm for the tired mind, a sensuous massage (with a happy finish) for the worn-out heart. But that, right now, isn't the radical idea; on the contrary, it's the idea that's stencilled on the side of the big machine, it's the dream that capitalism has for us, it's the marinade in which we nightly soak ourselves. </div><div><br /></div><div>(I'm going to be preachy for a moment, so feel free to pretend I'm pretending.) None of us get to "just" live. We live utterly, inextricably dependent on others: not only dependent as in needing their cooperation and support, but dependent as in, we live at their expense. (This perception, for me, is the first and foremost distinction between democratic socialism and anticapitalism.) Our freedom of choice is the gift we surgically extract from -- or, more often, butcher out of --others because we have the power to do so. They live in extreme poverty, and in hopelessness, and we never meet them. We live because they quietly, undisturbingly die, out of sight. It isn't that we don't know this; it's that knowing this makes us tired, deep down. The living we do comes with more strings attached than we can ever number, and the very last thing it is is 'just'. Our mobility as queer people, or trans people, is expensive to others; and if we are -- and we certainly are -- the victims of patriarchy and heteronormativity, the victims of capitalism too (especially when we see no other course but to wrap ourselves in its coat-tails and cling on), then part of our task is to face up to the ways in which our living is political: a task that relates not simply to a set of options for the content or aesthetics of our work, but to the capitalist syntax of every clause of its most basic premises. For that reason alone, though it makes us tired and uncomprehending and angry sometimes and cynical sometimes, and though we should be careful not to speak for those whose voices need to be heard in their own right, nonetheless the personal is not where our task of making queer or trans work, and living queer or trans lives, ends. Language is a minefield, yes, identity is exhausting, desire is complicated, courage is not always within reach: but that's what we've got to use for the work that's ahead of us. That's our apparatus. Language, like identity, like desire, like courage, is not something over which we can possibly have personal dominion or control. These are not things that individuals own. They are things that happen between us, things we negotiate. They're strains of social interaction. We can't choose to simply get over them: we can only choose within what is, finally, dependably, a binary opposition: that either those negotiations are collaborative, or they are coercive. If the personal is where the story ends, then it's also where the next one begins.</div><div><br /></div><div>I was half-listening the other day to a radio documentary about the first Comic Relief: Griff Rhys Jones (I think it was) was describing, during filming, a long difficult journey, which they'd been told would take twelve hours. That turned out to be a parlous underestimate. And so, he said, they spent six hours thinking they were ten minutes away from arriving. It sounded pretty arduous, but it also sounded really, really familiar. That's the queer experience, the constant travel of the trans experience, the thing we (partly at least) signed up to. We're never going to reach our destination. We know that. We don't want to get there. But we don't want to get off, either. This is where we belong. Ten minutes, always, perpetually, ten minutes away from arriving.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">* * *</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-8pAWKd5QyqY/TYaQH-VddOI/AAAAAAAACks/w6y985jy-y0/s1600/escher-hands.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 266px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-8pAWKd5QyqY/TYaQH-VddOI/AAAAAAAACks/w6y985jy-y0/s320/escher-hands.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5586310854466172130" /></a><div><br /></div><div>You'll have noticed, if you read Scottee's terrific post, that he puts 'theatre' in scare quotes. And one of the concerns I have about the turn away from 'queer' and towards 'trans' is that it reminds me very much of the bifurcation (which perhaps, twenty-odd years on, is becoming blurrier and more unstable again) of theatre and live art in Britain during the time that I've been making stuff. Live art is a territory that is partly occupied by performance makers who do not, like earlier generations of performance artists, come directly out of a visual arts background, but who have instead turned away from theatre because, for them, theatre has become about a set of aesthetic and formal propositions that have become inert at best and persistently vegetative at worst, and certainly nowhere to be found on the 'cool map'. (Must remember to get one of those next time I'm in Foyles.) As a result, the live art sector flourishes but we now in this country have only the stubbornest vestige of a truly experimental theatre sector, like a silly appendix flapping in the wind. (N.B. if <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">your</span> appendix is flapping in the wind, tell a teacher or another grown-up immediately.) Many of those who could have helped remodel downstream theatre have absented themselves from directly engaging with the task, having sailed serenely away on their life-rafts, ships deserting a sinking rat.</div><div><br /></div><div>There are, on both sides, no end of hygienic, self-cleaning manoeuvres to allow us to stay affianced to our preferred constructions. You could have heard a couple of them at the queer D&amp;D on Monday. The wonderful <a href="http://www.matildaleyser.co.uk/">Matilda Leyser</a> called a session asking to examine the assertion I'd made in the invitation (with a little more scepticism, I think, than I've previously made it in other contexts) that "theatre is inherently queer" -- in other words, and as I've already suggested above, that the characteristics of theatre as I understand and want it are frequently the same as the characteristics of queerness as I understand and want it. But I had to confess to Matilda that in order to make that a sustainable position, one occasionally has to pull a little ignoble switcheroo and insist that wherever theatre does not represent those qualities (as of course it very frequently doesn't), that's because that's <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">not really theatre</span>, but some horrid effigy thereof. Meanwhile, in another part of the room, Amy was telling Jonny that she wanted nothing to do with 'theatre' (scare quotes) because for her theatre was all that fourth-wall, aloof, scripted, unresponsive, audience-ignoring stuff. And what of theatre work that didn't do those rotten stupid things? That's not theatre, then, that's performance.</div><div><br /></div><div>That we draw these contour lines, wanting to distance ourselves from conduct that we find unbecoming -- distance ourselves in language, not just through the evidences of our work -- is as often productive and clarifying, in the culture as a whole, as it is divisive or self-aggrandizing; over the years I've spent plenty of my time in these pages doing exactly that, probably with an admixture of all those kinds of consequence. Yet sometimes we see parsing going on, efforts of terminological contradistinction, and can only wonder at what motivates the gesture.</div><div><br /></div><div>A startling example of this jumped out at me a few days ago from p.228 of Aleks Seriz's new book <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Rewriting the Nation: British Theatre Today</span>. Here, Sierz describes Tim Crouch's <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">England</span> as a "performance piece". I haven't quite finished reading the book but as far as I can see it's the only time he uses that particular phrase. What's he getting at? Why isn't <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">England</span> a play? Crouch is very clear, if you ask him, that he writes plays; why does Sierz disagree? What does he think <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">England</span> does that a play shouldn't do, that places it the other side of the line?</div><div><br /></div><div>I've been reading <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Rewriting the Nation</span> mostly because writing, play-writing (which we should distinguish from being a play-wright: 'write' and 'wright' are two quite different ideas), has in the past few years come back into being part, a big part, of what I think I do in the world -- and anyway, Sierz's subtitle, 'British Theatre Today', is also how you might describe my workplace, so it behoves me to know how others see it, see us. More pressingly, I've lately been spending some time working at, and with, the Royal Court, where I'm now about to spend the week producing a new draft of, and then directing a rehearsed reading of, my new play <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Extremists</span>: the ongoing conversation with the Court has been pleasurable and interesting but I feel like I'm engaging with a family whose culture and expectations are quite different from my own, and it feels like good manners if nothing else to read stuff like Sierz's and try to come to terms with it.</div><div><br /></div><div>In particular, I was interested in what Sierz's line might be because the conversation with the Royal Court started, about a year ago, with a question about whether there was any way to reconcile devising practice with the idea of the 'state of the nation' drama. Given the (potentially) incredibly responsive technologies of devising, it's seemed for a while rather a shame to me that it's normally used to create and populate theatrical spaces that are fictive, liminal, bubble-like, literally other-worldly. I wanted to think about using it to do work that was more politically engaged (at the level of content, as well as, obviously, formally) and readier to take on bigger, more serious character-driven stories. So, initially, that's what the<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"> Extremists</span> project was all about. But devising is of course expensive and slow and frighteningly unpredictable and, unsurprisingly, there was a pressure -- or, no, an encouragement -- to downscale, to still do the big picture but on smaller terms. Which is howcome, twelve months on, I have in my hand a play script about five people in a restaurant. And I'm fine about that, actually: I've found myself somewhere pretty uncomfortable and unfamiliar (which is what I was mostly asking for), and I feel like the piece is still asking the questions I wanted to be able to articulate. I'm hoping that by the end of this week it'll even be a piece that the Royal Court is able to look at and not find baffling and alien, or not <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">only </span>those things.</div><div><br /></div><div>'State of the nation' is an odd phrase though and it's not been easy thinking through the nagging question of what it means in relation to <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Extremists </span>and what it signifies with regard to the specifically British national focus of Sierz's book. What Sierz is up to is a two-part act of description or definition: he is trying, rather admirably, to say what 'new writing' is (and is not); and then he's looking to characterise the ways in which new writing in British theatre helps to articulate something about the range of British national experience in particular. I am a bit lost with some of it: it is not, really, what I want, and I don't quite understand what Sierz wants from it. He's obviously heavily invested in a model of British theatre that is, in his words, "neither literary nor intellectual, but theatrical and practical"; in <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">my</span> words, extremely literary and pragmatic, but antitheatrical and anti-intellectual. I've rehearsed my position (contra Sierz's, in this case) so many times on this blog that it seems hardly necessary to get into the scrap again. But there's much going on in Sierz's book which frustrates so agonisingly because he is so often so nearly on to something valuable.</div><div><br /></div><div>It's very much to his credit that he takes a couple of chapters to essay an examination of what 'new writing' actually means, rather than taking the phrase at face value. (He's even kind enough to quote, approvingly it seems, some words of mine on the subject -- though I slightly winced to see it, as the sentence he lifted out of the Guardian article in question was, at the time of its initial publication, a bit marmalised by the subediting process, with the result that it doesn't quite read like me -- which matters, just a little, in the context of a chapter that touches on the idea of the distinctive voice!) It's good to see him name Alan Bennett's <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The History Boys </span>as a new play that is <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">not</span> an example of new writing; odd, though, that that's the only one he's prepared to discuss in any detail -- and even then he allows that "Bennett's play is not bad", which is not an assessment I could easily agree with: I think it <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">is</span> a bad play precisely (though only partly) because, as Sierz says, "it's simply not contemporary".</div><div><br /></div><div>That smack of contemporariness -- relevance, to borrow another word from Sierz -- is certainly of importance (provided we know in what ways relevance is and isn't meaningful), and I want those things for <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Extremists</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="">; </span>I especially want topicality (I intend to rewrite some of it this week to refer forward a day to the TUC march on the Saturday after the reading), as a sort of simulation of liveness. But Sierz hears the newness of 'new writing' differently than I do, I think. He's enchanted by (what he takes to be) street language, and endlessly entertained by swearing; but equally he's wary about the kind of newness that dates quickly. I think I feel exactly the reverse. I'd echo Scotty's distrust of Time Out, I suppose: by the time a reported language novelty is registering in a play at the Bush or the Royal Court, it's already dead, pinned to a card like a butterfly in a museum. Whereas it doesn't matter very much to me that a play that mentions, I dunno, Windows 95 is trapped in its period. Why do we want plays to last anyway? Why should that be what theatre is for? Why do we want to pick a play text off the shelf and still get a whiff of newness off it? Because, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">pace</span> Sierz, actually our theatre culture <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">is</span> literary, it <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">is</span> about the translation of books into live formats, and we think books need to <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">continue</span>. I don't dislike that <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">per se</span>: for example, I'm rather glad to pick up and read, as I did a couple of days ago, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Shopping and Fucking</span>: it's dated really badly, but the writing, the play itself, seems to me to come through more clearly than it did at the time of its first production. A little distance improves the view.</div><div><br /></div><div>But the contemporary is a watchword for Sierz because he so badly wants theatre to be a participant in a national debate about national identity and national values, so it has to look to how we live <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">now</span> in order to report back to us about ourselves. Again, I feel a bit deaf to these desires: I fervently <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">don't</span> want theatre to be a participant in a national debate that isn't happening anyway about a national identity we do not have and have no business aspiring to and national values that are largely indecipherable and, when on occasion they can be made out, tend to be either meaningless or psychotic. When I think of the 'state of the nation' task I wanted -- and still want -- <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Extremists</span> to undertake, actually the 'nation' part is a borrowed shorthand for a bunch of questions that have nothing really at all to do with Britishness or Englishness, and everything to do with ethics, ideology, power, morality; <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Extremists </span>is concerned with the ways that political rhetoric at an international level shapes and contorts our ability to conceptualise the connections between personal behaviour and morality on the one hand and global ideological and economic currents on the other. I have no interest whatsoever in how these tensions ramify at a specifically national scale, and I don't feel like I really understand people who do. But I appreciate many rational people <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">do </span>want the national debate, the national frame, the national portrait gallery: what I <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">then</span> don't understand is how on earth they come to believe that <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">theatre</span> is an appropriate container for those things. Increasingly, and more than ever across the past decade that Sierz is describing, theatre has been more and more distinct in its locality, we have valued more and more the fact that theatre is something that takes place near us, and is somewhere we gather for an experience of nearness. The reason <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The History Boys</span> worked so much better on the telly (where it obviously belonged in the first place) is because, as Sierz more or less indicates, it was about nowhere in particular, at a time that never was, except in Bennett's suddenly heatedly liberated imagination. (Bennett is titillated by swearing almost as much as Sierz, I think.) The 'national' is first and foremost now a televisual space, in that television operates largely in relation to national borders, with a little public service provision for what used to be (and may still be) called 'regional variations'. The three National Theatres (I don't mean the three spaces of the NT, but the NT and the national theatres of Scotland and Wales) have not much to do with genuinely <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">nationally</span> constituted theatrical identities: they're more about the conferring of prestige and liberal cultural endorsement on particular voices and programmes and identities at particular times for shifting strategic reasons. The theatre space and the national space just don't map on to each other any more (except in exceptional cases such as this weekend's excellent Theatre Uncut project, which genuinely has had some national reach) and I can't see that there's any reason to require that they should. Sierz meanwhile suggests that the Royal Court production of Leo Butler's <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Lucky Dog </span>in its closing stages "radiated the possibility of change, surely an allegory of national life." As a theatre maker who seeks to suffuse all his work with exactly that radiation of the "possibility of change", the idea that "national life" even begins to register as a frame for comprehending and articulating those possibilities -- let alone "surely" -- feels totally strange to me. I want the possibility of change to include the possibility that the nation state is in fact an exhausted and malignant idea, one that persists wholly to buoy up established power and endless recapitulations of imperial extension and reassertions of patriarchal authority. So, er, I'm not sure that I any longer feel like Sierz's target audience, for all that his book is about the place where I go to work each day.</div><div><br /></div><div>Really, I'd like to see the version of <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Rewriting the Nation</span> that's exactly the book that Sierz says he doesn't want to write. His disclaimers hint at the book that needs writing. Early on he makes the soulless, fuck-ugly distinction between "New Writing Pure" and "New Writing Lite", and pivots from that into overtly writing out of the story all those "organisations whose primary focus is on ensemble acting, physical theatre, devised work, live art, multi-media experiments, site-specific ventures, street theatre, theatre-in-education, one-off one-person shows, circus, or whose main objective is community work, work with children, young people, prisoners or puppets." Oh, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">fuck off</span>. "There's nothing wrong with these kinds of theatre -- they are simply not the subject of the book." Quite right: and there's nothing wrong with black people, they just don't belong in <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/mar/15/midsomer-murders-producer-race-row?INTCMP=SRCH">The Midsomer Murders.</a></span><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/mar/15/midsomer-murders-producer-race-row?INTCMP=SRCH"> </a></div><div><br /></div><div>Somebody tried to suggest a few days ago that my assessment of <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Rewriting the Nation</span> was a bit harsh because wasn't it after all simply "a survey"? But a survey, like, say, a poetry anthology, may pretend objectivity but is always, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">always</span>, an act of political electivity. By eliminating from his consideration the work that doesn't already fit his picture of what theatre should be attempting to do and concern itself with -- i.e. "New Writing Pure" -- he arrives at a hopelessly thin construction of what new writing is and of how writing as an art and as an act is <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">renewed</span>. Having reassured us in the Introduction that he understands the meaningfulness of form and the significance of the collaboration across disciplines in theatre production, he then dismisses as outwith his concern most of the work that has impacted on the development of theatrical form and genuinely collaborative practice over the period his survey covers. Writers -- maybe not playwrights, but writers -- are embedded in almost all of the processes and modes he lists as being "not the subject of this book", and the writing they do and have done in those contexts is vitally important in changing the scope of writing-for-theatre. Ultimately that work can't be covered in this survey because it won't show up as books on the bookshelf in the National Theatre bookshop, to be bought and sold alongside Sierz's own books, and Sierz, for all the 'correctness' of his acknowledgement that theatricality is something quite other than literariness, is a book-writer writing about other book-writers.</div><div><br /></div><div>Thus, for example, he reminds us in his intro that "the audience is a vital element in the creation of meaning" (the exemplary apotheosis of which that he's able to muster, having expunged from his consciousness almost all the genuinely, radically audience-facing work undertaken over the past decade, is someone saying "cunt" in Tom Stoppard's <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Rock 'n' Roll</span>, and it causing a frisson in the West End; given a fortnight and a tabletop covered in items for harming Marina Abramovic with, I still couldn't begin to find a way of caring less). But where is the audience in his account of formal innovation as a vital component in properly (or "Pure") new writing? I approve of almost all the playwrights he discusses in this context: Sarah Kane, Martin Crimp, Caryl Churchill, Simon Stephens. (He also drops in Anthony Neilson's <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Wonderful World of Dissocia</span>, of which regular viewers will know I am not such a fan, though I'm not going to reheat that cold old chestnut right now; suffice it to say that he later gets around to describing that play as "kind of <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Alice in Wonderland</span> on acid": which gives you a pretty good sense of how fucking lame a lot of Sierz's writing is -- it's precisely <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tF2fN4MmMAY">this</a> lame -- though actually it's also a perfectly serviceable description of <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Dissocia</span>, which is one way of saying why, with all due respect to Anthony, I found it a bit unsatisfactory as a piece of theatre.) But how these writers' formal manoeuvres engage or shape the audience's encounter with their work and the "creation of meaning" goes completely unexamined, just when we could most use it. This question is particularly begged by Sierz's singling-out of Simon Stephens's <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Pornography</span> -- an excellent play, I think, one of the best of recent times (though I'd like to see a production other than Sean Holmes's, fine though that was). One of the things that's exciting about <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Pornography </span>is that, as Sierz explains, a prefatory note in the text from Stephens indicates that: "This play can be performed by any number of actors. It can be performed in any order." But when I saw <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Pornography </span>at the Traverse, I didn't know that. It was a sort of bonus excitement to buy the text afterwards and see this very interesting offer that it makes to the director and the creative team who approach it. It's a fascinating way of introducing an open system into an otherwise closed text, and it clearly indicates Stephens's willingness to experiment formally, which is A Good Thing. At the same time, however, the experimental form of <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Pornography</span> as a text is completely invisible to an audience, or was in the case of Holmes's premiere production. So what kind of offer is it that Stephens is making, and by the time the play is encountered by its audience, how does that offer inform or inflect the creation of its meaning? This, ultimately, is what's annoying about Sierz's book: it's a series of identifications and assertions which <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">do</span> add up to an argument but it's not an argument that Sierz ever really acknowledges, because he's suggesting that it's only an argument about theatre in so far as it's also an argument about national identity, whereas it's not really that either. The ideological underscoring of Sierz's book sings loud and clear, once you tune in to it: it radiates the fear of the possibility of change -- radical change; toxic, unspeakable fear. So he can't do anything rigorous here, even if he wanted to. Reading the book is like being shown a transcript of someone going off on one about theatre at a metropolitan dinner party where no one else has the balls to call them on anything. It reminds me a bit of Dominic Dromgoole's <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Full Room</span>; it's weaker, if anything, but it reminds me of how I kept expecting Dromgoole's chapters to end with the line: "Right, I'm off for a piss."</div><div><br /></div><div>But where, delicate reader, is <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Extremists </span>in all this?</div><div><br /></div><div>For a while, I've been sketching my own contribution to the NT's bookshelves; hopefully later this year I'll make a start. I want to write a book-length version of <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Forest and the Field </span>(which Thompson's diehards will know was first an essay and then a performance lecture), which tries to think through the theatre encounter from the baseline up. I always figured the basic substance of the thing would be four chapters, each neatly titled after a suggestive pairing: 'Space and place', on the physical and conceptual spaces where an act of theatre might be staged; 'The naked and the nude', on actors and how they are read; 'Signal and noise', on the presence of the audience and the negotiation of meaning-production; and finally 'The forest and the field', on how that space in which actors and audience come together relates to the wider culture and the bigger living space around them. I thought I could say everything I needed to say under one of those four headings.</div><div><br /></div><div>But I begin to wonder if there's a fifth, that needs to be dropped in before the third or fourth, which would be called: 'The window and the wall'.</div><div><br /></div><div>This is a somewhat less developed argument, as it stands, and there are problems with it, even in the version which I trust more, which is the way I tell it when I'm trying to talk to students (often quite young ones) or nonspecialist audiences about poetry. Speciously, reductively, but not entirely without foundation, I divide poets into two types: those who present the reader with a window, and those who present her with a wall.</div><div><br /></div><div>Most British poetry, and certainly most of the most visible British poetry, at the present time, is offering a window. Through this window we can see beyond, into a kind of framed picture. What we think we see in this picture, through this window, is what "happens" in the poem. Somebody visits a church and thinks about mortality; somebody stands at the bus stop and overhears somebody say something that reminds them of something else that they thought once and it made them feel sad or wistful; somebody touches somebody else's hand and is embarrassed to be in love with them. That's what's happening through the window, and the job of the poet is to help us see through the window, through the transparent pane of language that's been provided for us to peer through. Some of the poets might put slightly ripply glass in the window so that you can't see very well. Or they might breathe on it and then draw something amusing with their finger, so that you can see something beyond but you're not <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">quite</span> sure what it is. But it's all about the window, and what you see when you look through it.</div><div><br /></div><div>And then there's another kind of poetry, the kind that in general I prefer, where there is no window. There's just a wall, a blank wall: and if you're used to looking through a window, you might well be cross: the poet, you will say, has neglected to provide a window to be looked through: therefore, you will say, there is nothing to see. But if, bravely, you stick with it, you will start to look at the wall, this wall where language is opaque, not glassy, not even translucent, a wall not to be seen through, but to be seen, to be seen for itself. Look at the wall and you see how textured it is. You start to come into a relationship with it as a material. You look at the variegation of colour, the different kinds of texture. Maybe you touch it, lean against it, put your body up to it. Maybe you try to slam into it: and maybe it resists your intervention, or maybe you damage it slightly, maybe it rocks or reverberates as you kick it. Maybe you still want the thing that might be beyond it. Maybe you will try to get someone to give you a bunk-up so you can see over the top. Maybe you'll try to punch a window into it, and you'll hurt your hand. Good. See all these maybes? See how few maybes there were when there was a window?, the window being a sign that this, this aperture, this focus, this is where your attention should be, on what's on the other side of this window. But see how busy you are now, figuring out this wall, precisely because there's no window. The thing you're paying attention to is not on the other side, not in a different space. It's you and the wall, together, and it's the thing, and you're the thing, and the way you meet each other, in the space that exists between you and includes you, that's what determines the quality of your encounter.</div><div><br /></div><div>It's reductive, of course; there are glass walls sometimes and there are interesting narrow arrow-slit windows and peepholes into lavatory cubicles and there are concrete bunkers with amazing skylights and there are walls that are paper-thin and textureless and bland: but there, for the sake of it, bear with me, are a couple of contrasting types of experience: the encounter with a window, and the encounter with a wall.</div><div><br /></div><div>And it must surely be clear that we can translate this across to theatre, too. It helps if you imagine a proscenium arch -- because what is a pros arch if not a window? It doesn't <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">actually </span>have to be a pros arch, of course, there are lots of different physical and spatial arrangements that will create the same relationships, the same patterns of meaning-production, as a pros arch, including some very exciting-looking, experimental-resembling immersive and interactive pieces and all of the sorts of things that Sierz doesn't want to think about because they are not what his book's about because they are not (yet) (exactly) books. Some theatre, at any rate, wants you to look through the window into what's beyond it. It wants to give you a picture. Aleks Sierz wants a picture. He wants a picture of Britain today. Outside! Right now! That's what he wants to see. He wants to look through the window and see real life, but better, clearer, more vivid, more organized, more distinct. Most of the theatre he talks about wants something similar. A window on the world. (Or, not the world, please, just a bit of the world I could get to by train in a matter of a few hours.) As if a wall of someone's house, or a hospital, or a restaurant -- oh, look, shit, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Extremists</span> is set in a restaurant! -- had become transparent, or nearly, and you could see in. Or one of those mirrored glass arrangements they use for psychological monitoring experiments (and scopophiliac orgies in 1970s movies) where you can see without being seen. Maybe you'll catch sight of a little of your own reflection in the pane of glass. Maybe the glass will suddenly become completely mirrored and the audience will see itself reflected back. (Sierz actually bothers to say something like this at least once, as if it were a thought.) Theatre is our entry ticket for an insight into something beyond, a private space that becomes for a while transparent. We get to see through the window.</div><div><br /></div><div>Or, there's a wall. There's nothing to see; not yet. We can look at the wall but, this time, because it's theatre, not a poem, we experience the wall not as individuals but as a roomful of people. A roomful of people and a wall. Or, four walls, why not; and a door, that's closed, but open, openable?, but difficult (is it OK to leave?). We might choose to examine the wall, its textures, its material qualities. But that, in this case, would feel odd, because here we are with a bunch of people. There's nothing beyond; ain't nobody here but us, here, and now. This is not a picture of here and now for a metropolitan critic to look at while he's washing up and talking back to <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Any Answers? </span>on Radio 4. This is a real here and a real now and even if somehow the room is explained to us as a fiction, even though we've come here knowing that our presence in here is temporary and it could for that reason feel like a game, our presence is not negligible. We are embedded in the form of this moment: the offer is to us, only to us, there's nowhere else for it to be. Here we are together in a room for a while and what are we going to make of it. The possibility of change is not beyond, is not beyond beyond. It is here, if we can just stand to look at each other. -- But it's important to say, and it might be important that we know this, that just because there is no beyond, doesn't mean there's no author, doesn't mean there's no craft. It's not just any room, not just any four walls. This meeting, this place we came to, to be here, this has been crafted. Maybe it's been written, maybe the walls are a construction in language, this is not necessarily a physical room at all, it's a room where we meet in thought, lousy fucking intellectuals that we are. A lived-in place where we see each other, and are seen, are looked back at. There is no mirror held up to us because that mirror would simply illustrate, would simply elaborate on, what we are already experiencing.</div><div><br /></div><div>In both cases, both the poetry and the theatre versions of this mind-game, there are worthwhile experiences to be had looking through the window into a beyond. That can be a very beautiful and interesting thing to do. But I think, on the whole, I have mostly valued those poets, and those playwrights and theatre-makers, who trust me with my own presence, who want to hold me in relation with a wall, or some walls, who want me to be in a place, on my own or with others, that is not a picture of here and now and relevance and contemporariness, is not a picture at all, but that <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">is</span> here and now, and is relevant and contemporary entirely by dint of being here and now and radiant with the possibilities of real radical change.</div><div><br /></div><div>You will perhaps say that the theatre I value is still entirely about a picture, a picture of beyond: an image of social change, of my preposterous anticapitalist utopia, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KP9PNSUME4">somewhere down the crazy river</a>, and perhaps that's true, perhaps even in my most beyondless theatrical moments I'm still kind of seeing through a glass darkly. Well, OK, maybe so. But then in that case let me look for that concomitant glimpse of my reflection, the reflection of all of us in the room together. Let me catch sight briefly of what we all look like, superimposed on that utopian backdrop. I can work with that.</div><div><br /></div><div>But I don't think that's what <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Extremists</span> is at all. For the first time since, perhaps, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2007/may/25/theatre1?INTCMP=SRCH">Speed Death of the Radiant Child</a></span>, I seem to be making a piece that's not trying to be the change it wants to see, that's not leading an audience gently to a place of greater safety. <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Extremists</span> is angry and filthy and sardonic and angry again, I mean furiously angry, almost deranged with anger. Beneath its niceties and its playlikeness it's a window so grimy and smashed that you can't see through it. There is no access to beyond. Sometimes you look at the graffitoed wall and sometimes you look at the broken window and there's not much consolation in either of them, there's just confusion and embarrassment and paranoia. This is not like me, really: and this is why I'm excited about the project. I think I have been scared of letting anger come through in my work because theatre is a place I go to in order to love, and be loved. I think the quality of love is often better in the best theatre than it is in all but the most exceptional and fleeting moments of my life: which is why it matters to me that a book like Aleks Sierz's is nearly mostly right but actually mostly finally fucked: because I think in all his irreproachable intentions and his blatant and sometimes contagious enthusiasm for theatre that's really trying to get something done, I'm afraid he is lying about love, in the way that movies and pop songs and the bad poetry of beyondness lie about love. So that's a touchy subject.</div><div><br /></div><div>What I do know, though, with <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Extremists </span>waiting for me tomorrow -- yes, it's tomorrow now, I cheated, I kept writing, it's Sunday evening now, you know as well as I do that I couldn't tell you the <a href="http://www.mrbreakfast.com/article.asp?articleid=20">recipe for toast</a> in two hours -- is that love and anger are (as I said once elsewhere about something else entirely) two hands each drawing the other. I want to write a play that has no beyond because this is no time to be looking out of the window. There's <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SB3igiCchbw">no future in England's dreaming</a>. I'm so fucking angry <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">all the time </span>and I want better love, here and now, and my back is up against the wall.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><iframe title="YouTube video player" width="490" height="440" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/HPx1urhmfD4?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>I'll tell you how it goes.</div><div><br /></div><div>xx</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>And a little postscript before beddy-byes. I did a foolish thing, I checked Twitter before shutting down. The <a href="http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23notinmyname">#notinmyname</a> hashtags have started appearing in relation to our air strikes on Libya, and no doubt that slogan will re-emerge more forcefully and broadly in the days and weeks of this new misadventure that lie ahead. Hopefully if I say this now, it'll stop making me nuts and I won't get all bent out of shape... I say this in a spirit of friendship and respect: the problem with 'not in my name' is that, sadly, wretchedly, I'm afraid it's incorrect. All this <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">is</span> done in your name, whether you personally want it or not, whether you agree with it or not: and saying that it's <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">not</span> done in your name is an absolutely meaningless wriggle of self-absolution. Register your protest with another phrase, by all means, but don't pretend your complicity is something you get to opt out of, a box you get to uncheck. You -- like me -- are a participant in a liberal democracy, and that democratic system in which you participate and upon which you rely has produced these outcomes. If you don't like what's being done in your name, oppose it, resist it, as loudly and insistently and obdurately as you want: but face up to the fact that we're all in this together, up to our necks, and that little sidestep you want to tell us about just makes you look like you don't get it. These airstrikes, and countless other less spectacular incidents and acts of violence all over the world, these things <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">are</span> done in your name, every day, day after day: this is what we ask for by living as we currently consent to live, and the least we can do, the least we owe our victims, is to acknowledge it: and if we no longer consent to live like this, then there's a lot of work to do, and that work needs a different hashtag. Thanks x</div><div><br /></div>Chris Goodehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17993698000314709291noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28051672.post-86027598376432074182011-03-12T23:42:00.020+00:002011-03-14T13:26:13.255+00:00Another season, another reason...<div><br /></div><br /><iframe title="YouTube video player" width="540" height="460" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/zzZigm0SJv8?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>So here we are, back in that odd betwixty period between the first day of climatological spring, which was March 1st (woo), and the first day of astronomical spring, which is March 20th (boo), and frankly my dear, I just don't care about the niceties today: here is a unilateral declaration of spring: it is, incontrovertibly, spring where I am, and if you are near where I am then it is spring where you are too. Today, for me, has been one of those days you award yourself every so often when circumstance and ambience and emotion align and it becomes exhilaratingly clear to you that the rest of your life begins now.</div><div><br /></div><div>I have arrived in spring because, after an excruciatingly long period of being away from home (I've spent a total of about thirty days in London since last July), I arrived back here after my recent L.A. adventures only to go straight in to quite a hectic period of re-thinking and then re-rehearsing my solo show <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Adventures of Wound Man and Shirley</span>, for two performances only, down the road at <a href="http://www.stkinternational.co.uk/STK/STK.html">Stoke Newington International Airport</a>. Those shows <a href="http://www.hackneycitizen.co.uk/2011/03/11/chris-goode-the-adventures-of-wound-man-and-shirley-review/">went really well</a>, I think -- I had a lovely time (not least working with my brilliant director and designer/technical manager, Wendy Hubbard and James Lewis, who between them took the most extraordinary care of me and helped make it, I think, a more robustly achieved piece than it was before) and I really felt at home doing the show at the Airport -- but, more importantly, they're <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">over</span>. They're over and done and now everything ahead of me, at least for the next little while, is new and unknown and exciting and, most happily of all, is here, right here in the place where I live, and where most of the people I love are most likely to be found. Honestly this homecoming has felt like <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvCjyWp3rEk">the thing with the hippies and the lion</a>.</div><div><br /></div><div>Not that there's much let-up, of course. On Monday I'm hosting a<a href="http://us1.campaign-archive1.com/?u=a5189ca3fc76859d6e74c21e3&amp;id=1bc32a735d&amp;e="> Devoted &amp; Disgruntled satellite session on queer theatre</a>, with Phelim McDermott facilitating, in the bar at Oval House. My role is purely ceremonial really -- a bit of burbling and ribbon-cutting -- but thereafter I get to be part of whatever conversations emerge, like everyone else, and that's the bit I'm really looking forward to. Do come if you can -- like all D&amp;Ds, and notwithstanding the standard mantra that "whoever comes are the right people", actually the better the turnout, (often) the livelier the discussion. We're going to be talking about whatever aspects of or questions around queer theatre and performance turn out to be in people's heads on the night, but I particularly hope that the widest possible range of voices -- from both within and outside the existing community/ies of queer makers and audiences -- will be present. Queer theatre is not, or not only, a coterie art, and the more the questions that arise can be opened out to a multiplicity of perspectives and turned to catch the light of a genuine range of experience, the more exciting I think the session will be.</div><div><br /></div><div>Beyond that, I'm going to be starting work on a new solo piece, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.londonwordfestival.com/index.php/2011/02/keep-breathing-by-chris-goode/">Keep Breathing</a></span>, which has been commissioned by the Drum in Plymouth and is being kindly supported by the <a href="http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&amp;source=web&amp;cd=1&amp;ved=0CCAQFjAA&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.londonwordfestival.com%2F&amp;ei=ThR8Tb6uJ5Sh4QbS87CHBg&amp;usg=AFQjCNHDdjHeqS-TormzV6QLjmiBuz8g-g">London Word Festival</a>, where I'm going to be sharing a <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">very early</span> draft towards the end of April. I'm also going to be spending a week at the Royal Court, getting ready for a rehearsed reading of my new play <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.royalcourttheatre.com/whats-on/the-extremists">The Extremists</a></span> (which may or may not be getting close to being a "finished" item by then) on Friday 25th March -- it's an afternoon gig, but again, please <a href="http://www.royalcourttheatre.com/whats-on/the-extremists">come along if you can</a>, I could really use some support and feedback: it's a pretty curious piece of work and I feel quite a long way out on a not wholly comfortable (but rather exciting) limb. And then I'll be starting work on a new duo piece for home performance, drawing on the <a href="http://beescope.blogspot.com/2010/11/speaking-about-love.html">Hockney cancellation prints</a> and Cavafy poems that I mentioned here a few weeks ago; couldn't be more excited about that one. And then off to the National Theatre Studio for a bit... and, well, I won't go on. You get the picture. Lots happening -- for the next little while, at any rate. More imminently, tomorrow I get back into rehearsal/R&amp;D with <a href="http://whateverall.blogspot.com/">Jonny Liron</a> for a new piece (or more likely two) with him, which is a giddyingly exciting prospect after a little while being thwarted by distance and other commitments; and hopefully on Monday or Tuesday, at long, long, much-too-long last, I'll finally get the poetry anthology I've been editing, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Better Than Language</span>, off to the printers, which should mean, G-d and (more frighteningly and inscrutably) UPS willing, that that will finally make it into the world before too many of the "young poets" collected in it reach late middle-age.</div><div><br /></div><div>Quite a bit, I'm hoping, coming up here at Thompson's, too: at least, a post to introduce and think through some of the issues around <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"&g